Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 321

Victoria De Rijke’s Duck belongs to Reaktion Book’s very striking Animal series of short, popular texts; a series, for those who are not yet familiar with it, which encompasses other birds such as the chicken and the sparrow, but also rather less ubiquitous animals such as the camel. As one of this series, Duck is beautifully produced and includes a total of 124 colour and black- and-white figures drawn from fine art, illustration and photography.

The book is written wittily and is wide-ranging. The first chapter on the natural history of the bird reads in places rather like a Victorian primer. The taxonomic history and description of habitat do not get any critical treatment, no placing or situating within wider academic debate, but, rather, draw on naturalists from the nineteenth century, who are then placed alongside twentieth-century field studies to delineate the duck’s habits. This situates the animal within its empirical context by time and place, meets the needs of the wider audience, and introduces some early points about the duck’s environment and relationship with (and interpretation by) the human species, which are developed later. The next chapter focuses on the various uses to which the duck has been put by its human captors and keepers – it tackles the very many ways in which it has been trapped and hunted worldwide and throughout history, its domestication, its consumption, and its depiction in art and literature. The third, entitled ‘The Duck’s Quack’ deals with its literal utterance ‘quack’, human descriptions of duck language and the human meanings attaching to ‘duck’ in idiom and slang. The next two chapters focus on the duck as represented in human culture – mechanical ducks, ducks in Disney films and fine art, duck ornaments, duck buildings, toy ducks and so on – and the conclusion addresses the meaning of ducks.

Duck is a catalogue of ducks and duck-ish things: it tackles the material and natural, as well as the cultural history of the bird, and contains some striking and thought-provoking observations, yet in many instances the author did not develop them further, and this is a real shame. The series to which Duck belongs means that the text is somewhat restricted, because of the limits placed on its length, which can be seen in a tendency to generate an inventory of interesting points in most of the chapters, and an almost breathless style. The book contains a number of astute observations, however, and is at its best when it dwells a little longer on them, such as those in connection with the use of decoys.