Description
Adult males are 60 to 70 cm long and have a distinctive large, leathery lobe underneath the bill; females are 47 to 55 cm long and unadorned. Their drab dark grey-brown, sightly pin-striped plumage is unconspicuous and does not differ between the sexes. Musk Ducks float very low in the water, almost like a cormorant, and the large webbed feet are well back on the body. The ducklings are covered in dark brown down.
In its native range, the fanned tail is distinctive, allowing to distinguish this species from the Freckled Duck (Stictonetta naevosa) which has similar size, coloration and habits. The Blue-billed Duck (Oxyura australis) has a similarly shaped tail but the main colour of its males in breeding plumage is a much richer chestnut brown. Females and males in nonbreeding plumage are very similar however and if one is not intimately familiar with the slight differences in behavior, they cannot be told apart from female Musk Ducks at a distance. Male Musk Ducks in the breeding season are usually unmistakable due to the large bill lobe.
Read more about this topic: Musk Duck
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.”
—Freda Adler (b. 1934)
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)