Domestic ducks, known as "wu" in ancient my country, are one of the most widely raised poultry in the world today. They were domesticated from wild ducks. Due to a lack of data, the exact timeline of duck domestication remains unclear. According to scholars, China and Southeast Asia were the first regions to domesticate wild ducks. Europe, the Americas, and Egypt followed later. Records of duck farming can be found in my country's earliest ancient text, the *Erya*. Research suggests that my country began raising ducks in prehistoric times, making it one of the earliest countries in the world to domesticate wild ducks.
Domestic ducks exhibit far less variation than domestic chickens. Although their plumage differs significantly from wild ducks, male mallards, like male mallards, have four central tail feathers that curl upwards. Sometimes, their body feathers are also quite similar. Scholars generally now consider mallards to be a wild species of domestic duck. As early as 1184 AD, Luo Yuan's book, *Erya Yi*, explicitly identified the duck as a mallard. Mallards have a wide distribution, found in Asia, Europe, and North America.
Among the domestic ducks raised in the Yangtze River basin of my country, some may have been domesticated from the spotted duck. This duck is characterized by its black bill with a yellow tip, hence its alternative name, the yellow-billed duck. It is distributed in East Asia, widely distributed in coastal provinces of my country during the winter, and also found year-round in Central and South China. As for domestic ducks in the Americas, research suggests they were domesticated from the white-browed Muscovy duck.
There are fewer breeds of ducks than chickens. The Beijing duck, a world-renowned breed meticulously bred by the Chinese people over a long period, was introduced to the United States in 1874. Later, it was introduced from the United States to Britain, and now it is found in almost every country in the world.
