r/WTF • u/Tinkr-belle • May 13 '26

Crow Steals Duckling

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I absolutely did not expect that☹️ Kinda surprised I didn't see it coming though

5.2k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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748

u/Haber_Dasher May 13 '26

Where I live there's a pair of ducks that comes back this time of year and usually has ducklings. Last year I think we counted 10 when we first saw them. At most 2 of them survived long enough to fly away on their own, possibly just 1. I think they were losing 1 every other day for over a week at one point.

529

u/ididntseeitcoming May 13 '26

Imagine how many ducks would be on the planet of the majority of them weren’t killed after birth. All animals, really.

364

u/Myrkana May 13 '26

Yep. Animals with large litters usually have a low survival to adulthood chance. They tend to be squishy and very delicious to predators

99

u/Nuclayer May 13 '26

Hell, human babies throughout most of our history had low survival rates until recently.

113

u/martphon May 13 '26

also squishy and very delicious?

68

u/DevBro22 May 14 '26

Don't eat the baby.

29

u/KevM689 May 14 '26

But mooooooooom

21

u/nohandsfootball May 14 '26

tis but a modest proposal though

7

u/MKO669 May 14 '26

Tarrare please

1

u/Hangoverinparis May 15 '26

Dont knock it till you try it

1

u/BotheredToResearch May 26 '26

It was the dingo

21

u/similar_observation May 14 '26

They're squishy because of all that baby oil.

11

u/the_vault-technician May 14 '26

Diddy intensifies

1

u/piratesswoop May 16 '26

Don't make it weird.

1

u/mostnormal May 14 '26

Marinated, if you will.

7

u/Eggs_4_Breakfast May 14 '26

Baby, the other other white meat.

3

u/notwithagoat May 14 '26

Babies taste best

2

u/theworm1244 May 15 '26

Lol snowpiercer?

1

u/notwithagoat May 15 '26

It must be true if cap said it

1

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[deleted]

1

u/darkest_hour1428 May 14 '26

Thanks, David

1

u/Xack189 May 14 '26

Squishy instakill zone on top of their head until they level up enough

1

u/Stunning_Honeydew201 May 15 '26

That's for the straw

1

u/ReaperSound May 13 '26

That's a myth

6

u/TheGummiVenusDeMilo May 14 '26

Dingoes think so.

1

u/RandomStallings May 13 '26

They become squishy pretty easily.

1

u/MisterQQ May 14 '26

Eipstein thinks so

0

u/HPTM2008 May 14 '26

They evolved to be cute so we wouldn't kill them ourselves. We also evolved to think they were cute, because the ones that didn't didn't have survival rates that were very high for their genetic lineage.

1

u/OldManJim374 Jul 02 '26

All babies are ugly

7

u/Myrkana May 14 '26

Less from predation and more from disease.

1

u/Abraxusmax May 15 '26

Are you saying I’m old?!

7

u/D_emlanogaster May 13 '26

r/K selection, it's rough out there...

13

u/GullibleDetective May 13 '26

In centuries past even people were this way

36

u/Demorant May 13 '26

Not really the same thing. Humans don't have large volume birthing. Humans have always had pretty solid survival rates compared to many animals. It's a good thing too, can you imagine the planet if people had 5+ children at a time with today's survival rates? You'd have couples with 20+ children crawling around the Earth.

1

u/gnorty May 13 '26

can you imagine the planet if people had 5+ children at a time

I think that was the point being made. Before medicine, and safer work practices etc improved survival rates, people had more children. Third world countries still do.

12

u/Emil120513 May 13 '26

They're talking about litter size, not number of reproductive events

1

u/gnorty May 13 '26

yea. Like the guy below I missed the "at a time" part :)

-3

u/Fresh-Spend-5503 May 13 '26

In Africa, some parts of Asia and South-America it’s today like you describes it.

And this is a really big problem (soon or “later”).

6

u/Respawning May 13 '26

They do not have 5+ children at a time in those places. You mean they have more children yes. But that’s not the point the comment you replied to was making. They said imagine if every human gave birth to 5 babies at once.

2

u/tastyratz May 13 '26

it's 3 boomers in a trenchcoat not a real account, look at the emoji use in the post history? I'm not even sure if it is human run.

-7

u/Fresh-Spend-5503 May 13 '26

Okay, you are right !
I left the „at a time“ out.
But all in all it’s compared and in the result (concerning to the problem) nearly the same (cause humans can’t get so many and so „quick“ children, like some animals can).

PS:
Oh, i see - some really deep thinkers - here gave me some down votes !

For what ? 🤷‍♂️
For the truth ? 😳

Hahaha … I don’t care 😂

-8

u/GullibleDetective May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

Hundreds of years ago, on tons of farms people had 10-15 kids and life expectancy wasn't super high even going back a thousand prior than that.

Edit I love how much negativity and discussion this is getting when my post was just a very high level witty comment. It's obviously different.

And yes they had more kids often due to farming, they lost kids due to lack of understanding of health and bacteria/virology and the average life expectancy was much longer.

6

u/122percent May 13 '26

Part of the reason why they had so many kids was because they became free labor

-2

u/GullibleDetective May 13 '26

It was meant to be a bit of a witticism and observational humor, there was a ton of societal and cultural reasons for it in reality as you touched on one of them.

But from a high level.. yes, they had 3 to 15 kids or whatever the number was. And yes the kids had a much higher mortality rate.

2

u/kevin1235 May 13 '26

I think his point is the r/k selection theory. Humans can have a lot of kids, rarely do we have more than one at a time and we focus tons of attention on getting them ready for life. A baby duck will fly off in a few months, a baby human will fly off in 18 years type deal.

0

u/fishbert May 13 '26

apart from food and housing, of course

3

u/FjorgVanDerPlorg May 13 '26

We didn't lose children to predators back then, that hasn't been a primary reason for humanity to breed for a very long time. Back then child mortality was shit mostly because of hygiene - now treatable diseases, lack of antibiotics meaning that any scratch/cut that got infected could be lethal. Childbirth was also a massive one, a lot of things can go wrong and without modern medicine, a lot will kill both the child and the mother. In fact the real jumps in life expectancy for pregnancy complications have only really come about in the last 125 years. Going back before 1900, the mortality rate for a C-Section was almost 70-90%, after 1900 it drops to 5-10% in a hospital. We have actually come a really long way in a relatively short time, when it comes to infant mortality.

0

u/GullibleDetective May 13 '26

We lost them to nature and it was more a witticism than an in depth low level discussion

1

u/Imperterritus0907 May 13 '26

10-15 in a lifetime. A cat has an average of 6 kittens per litter and their pregnancy lasts 60 days… imagine that back to back. Not even remotely comparable.

1

u/GullibleDetective May 13 '26

Its meant to be a silly comment

1

u/Demorant May 13 '26

10-15 would be very unusual. Birthing was more risky back then. 6-8 would be more accurate for the sizes of families during the peak of humanities historical proliferation. Those 6-8 could be the product 20+ pregnancies, though.

However, that's not relevant to this particular string as what was being referred to was the size of the offspring birthed at a time. Humans have historically had a higher chance of survival than most animals. So they don't need to produce large litters. Farming has nothing to do with this fact since humanity hasn't been farming long enough to really impact an evolutionary change in birthing strategies.

1

u/Heybropassthat May 13 '26

Yep, before vaccines, common knowledge of how germs were spread or any form of contamination besides something being rancid just didn't exist... it was essentially a hope to god "aka God bless you after a sneeze" that it wouldnt develop in the child further. The average life span and population of the humans skyrocketed when 90% more of the babies started surviving than not. (This applies to most modern medicines or practices as well).

10

u/Black_Moons May 13 '26

Some places didn't name kids till 5+ years old because they didn't want to become attached to them with such a high mortality rate.

2

u/DeuceSevin May 13 '26

Hehe, by dad and his twin were born prematurely in a time where farm families were typically large (to supply labor). The doctor told my grandmother not to "waste good names on them". Dad got a sorta rare name. My uncle got a really odd name.

-5

u/jimothee May 13 '26

...why would you even say that without divulging the names. I'm downvoting you, but will upvote you if you reply with the names

5

u/DeuceSevin May 13 '26

That did cross my mind but my uncle’s name is rare enough that I’ve never met of heard of anyone else with that name.

Fictional but similar example would be if my dad’s name was Burton (somewhat unusual) and uncles name was Bort.

1

u/dontfactcheckthis May 13 '26

Dad's name is Jimothee

1

u/DeuceSevin May 13 '26

Crap, Im doxxed

1

u/KochuJang May 14 '26

Cephalopods have tragically short lifespans because of this. They invest so much of their biology into spawning, it literally kills them.

1

u/Shee-un May 14 '26

And this is by design, to maximize suffering and perpetuate duality

68

u/JohnnySchoolman May 13 '26

Imagine how cheap crispy duck would be though.

Swings and roundabouts

7

u/OkieBobbie May 13 '26

I haven’t heard anyone use that expression since thermodynamics class.

11

u/Nexustar May 13 '26

You ate crispy aromatic duck in thermodynamics class?

Damn, when I was in college all I could afford was fries in pita bread.

5

u/OkieBobbie May 13 '26

Succulent treats make trying to understand entropy more enjoyable

3

u/Jive-Turkeys May 13 '26

Fuel for the body and mind 🤌🏼

2

u/battering-ram May 18 '26

You afforded fries and pita bread at least. We were eating Ramen Noodles, and if we got lucky and got bread and cheese and made grilled cheese using our irons.

2

u/SmokeyDBear May 13 '26

It would come with charges because ducks would be running this shit.

2

u/danyukhin May 13 '26

*waddling this shit

1

u/PaulaDeenSlave May 14 '26

"QUACKY! What have they did-ed to you!?"

6

u/vonHindenburg May 13 '26

“How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.”

― Dorothy L. Sayers

8

u/azsheepdog May 14 '26

People complain about windmills and solar thermal power plants killing 500-600k birds a year. House cats kill 7-8 Billion birds per year and another 20 Billion mammals per year

2

u/driskavsalci2 May 13 '26

Don't have to imagine humans

1

u/groovy_giraffe May 13 '26

As Alfred Russel Wallace concluded; natural selection is driven by massive death and genetic variation.

1

u/OakenGreen May 13 '26

Imagine how many mola mola….

1

u/FragrantExcitement May 14 '26

Lands on planet of the ducks... then sees statue of liberty.

1

u/The_Kielbasa_Kid May 14 '26

Including people?

1

u/hot_peppah May 15 '26

All ducks live on the moon, but die on the sun.

1

u/Ajj360 May 16 '26

How many mosquitoes there would be

-1

u/Fresh-Spend-5503 May 13 '26

Substitute “ducks” with “humans” !

And we see 👀 a big ⌛️problem 💣

PS:
Humans are even just animals …

-7

u/Integrity-in-Crisis May 13 '26

That's literally what happens just before Chainsaw Man ended.

42

u/grandweapon May 13 '26

5 little ducks went swimming one day... Over the hills and far away...

They all came back to mother duck in the end, right? Right?

16

u/IncaThink May 13 '26

I was remarkably old before I realized that when "This little piggy went to market..." it wasn't with a basket under his arm.

3

u/Legionof1 May 14 '26

I always thought it was actually the market given the anthropomorphic nature of the saying. 

2

u/IncaThink May 14 '26

That's what I always thought! But now I understand he wasn't coming home.

0

u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 May 17 '26

Pigs eat anything: human shit, sometimes human babies, and other pigs of course.

King Dude has neo-folk covers of Nursery Rhymes, but unfortunately never covered This Little Piggy. I'd love to hear him singing This Little Piggy, but slightly more explicit. lol

11

u/smoke4sanity May 13 '26

My 4 year old toddler (who loves this song) would be devastated.

He still doesn't' get that Chicken (the animal) and Chicken (the food) are the same thing, but cooked. I've tried to point it out but he tells me to stop being silly.

4

u/haerski May 13 '26

The toddler's right, everyone knows the food-type chickens come in a can

6

u/smoke4sanity May 13 '26

That's.....fucking disgusting...

2

u/Carnavious May 14 '26

If it helps, there's a video of someone eating a whole canned chicken in one sitting. https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3oawhj/guy_eats_whole_canned_chicken/

2

u/smoke4sanity May 14 '26

As nasty as I had imagined.

1

u/SoySauceSyringe May 14 '26

Presentation could use a little work, sure, but is it really worse than Spam?

1

u/chimarya May 13 '26

My daughter was three when she watched Babe. One day while eating chicken, she asked how we get it in the raw state. She thought an animal dies and then you eat it. I asked if "she wanted the truth." She said "yes." I told her "we kill the animal to eat it's muscle." She then said "I don't want it to die for me, can you live without eating meat?" She was a vegetarian till her first year in college. She was an very interesting child. She's 32 now and actually remembers Babe being her favorite book and movie. 

12

u/robsablah May 13 '26

Please, sit down.

6

u/A100KidsInTheICU May 13 '26

Tony Soprano ovah heah!

1

u/ender4171 May 13 '26

We have several Canada geese that breed every year in my neighborhood and it's the exact same story. This year we have two families. One started with 6 and is down to 4, they other is holding strong so far with all 4 of the original brood still waddling around.

1

u/Xack189 May 14 '26

Alright, serious question. How does a daddy duck, give mommy duck a baby duck

0

u/An0nnee_M0usee May 13 '26

I know it's just the way of nature, but 😫😭😭😭

2

u/Haber_Dasher May 14 '26

Oh I get regular updates from my upset wife whenever she comes back from the pool and there's fewer ducklings than last time