Career Duck

Serious question here. How many wild ducks have you seen that have taken up a successful career in baking? As my voice is the only one I can hear, then Im going to assume that my answer is a unanimous one: wild ducks dont have careers! So it leads me to question why people still think its is a good thing to feed wild ducks bread? 20 years or more ago it was accepted but now we know better. Everyone I speak to knows that it is bad to feed bread to ducks, but not many know why.

Now here is what is going to blow your little mind, there are at least 4 strong reasons why ducks shouldnt eat bread:
Nutrition, ducks are omnivourous and they are not designed to live on bread, which has next to no nutritional value. Bread is full of carbohydrates and not much else. To a duck, this is like living off really bad take away. It just leads to unhealthy, overweight ducks.
Pollution, the ducks in the park get fed so often that the ducks' little tummies are full. So they leave what they dont eat to rot in the bottom of the lake. This in turn causes algae and other bad bacteria to grow and pollute the water way. .
Behaviour, most wild animals will take the easiest source of food. If you are constantly feeding a duck (I see people come to feed the ducks daily, and I once counted 5 different groups of people bringing plastic bags full of bread to the park to feed the ducks) and if the duck is full from all this bread, why would it bother to go foraging for food? This is bad as it upsets the ecosystem, gives pests a chance to flourish. If there are ducklings about then they learn this behaviour and dont properly learn to forage and fend for themselves.
Disease, as corny as it sounds the carb rich diet causes the ducks to poop more. A build up of faeces in any environment is a breeding ground for disease. If any uneaten bread is left on the land to go mouldy, this can harbour aspergillosis, a deadly lung infection that can decimate avian populations

In short, if ducks were meant to eat bread then they would have evolved to be bakers. Simple. So please dont feed them.