Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.
The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1227395/Most-people-ducks-bath--lot-arent-rubber.html
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4 comments:
These look like some sort of domestic duck or domestic duck/wild mallard crosses. Most of the "wild" mallards where I live have been polluted with domestic duck hybridization.
It says that a farmer found them. Was it a duck farmer?
Domestic animals occasionally don't breed when they should. In fact, wild animals that have a definite breeding season sometimes don't breed when they are supposed to. It is one way of ensuring that even these seasonal animals have some variation in case environmental conditions change and allows these species to evolve a new breeding season.
The duck story is cryptozoological if you think about it. Cryptids can be out of place animals and that sink is not the natural habitat of those ducks....
Liz
Definitely a "manky mallard" brood (see http://10000birds.com/manky-mallards-domestic-feral-or-just-plain-odd-mallards.htm ) - 3 of them look like they will grow up to be (approximately) wild-type Mallards in colouring, while the rest will be white or cream-coloured (leucistic). The other main colour phase that they come in (here in the UK, anyway) is the "bibbed" type, which as ducklings are dark brown with just a pale yellow breast patch, and as adults the breast patch is white while the males have the "standard" Mallard green head and are otherwise dark brown, while the females are universally black or dark brown apart from the white patch.
I have a lot of photos of various "manky mallards" in this gallery: http://gallery.atpic.com/27048
Wasn't the point of this story that the ducks were born a season or two early? Which makes it an unusual occurence, although hardly cryptozoological.
I'm sure I have it already on the News Blog.
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