How Fast Can Ducks Fly?

Most ducks cruise at 40 to 60 miles per hour, and migrating mallards are estimated at about 55. The fastest duck on record is a red-breasted merganser that held 80 miles per hour through the air — 100 over the ground with the wind behind it — for about 1,500 feet in Alaska in 1960. Tailwinds change everything: GPS-tagged mallards have been tracked at 100 miles per hour over the ground with a gale behind them, and one mallard met an airliner at 21,000 feet.

Cruising speed

Ducks Unlimited’s summary is the one to remember: “Most waterfowl fly at speeds of 40 to 60 mph, with many species averaging roughly 50 mph.” Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology gives the mallard figure — “Ducks are strong fliers; migrating flocks of Mallards have been estimated traveling at 55 miles per hour” — and Ducks Unlimited adds the fuel bill: “Mallards migrating at 55 miles per hour burn 1 gram of body fat for every four miles they fly.” The small ducks that hunters call fast are not: “Blue-winged and green-winged teal, thought by many hunters to be the fastest ducks, are actually among the slowest, having a typical flight speed of only 30 mph.” Their speed is an illusion of size and twisting flight.

The most careful measurements come from radar. A 2007 study in PLoS Biology tracked migrating birds of 138 species and subtracted the wind, so that what remained was the bird’s own airspeed. Ducks came out in the range of 15 to 20 metres per second — roughly 34 to 45 miles per hour — and “The diving ducks reached the fastest mean speeds in our sample, with several species exceeding 20 m/s, up to 23 m/s”, which is about 51 miles per hour. That is the steady speed of a bird going somewhere, not a bird being chased.

The fastest duck

On 29 May 1960 Max C. Thompson was flying low up the Kukpuk River in northern Alaska when “a flock of six Red-breasted Mergansers (Mergus serrator) was flushed from the river ahead of the airplane.” He published what happened in The Condor the next year. “The wind was blowing from the west at 20 miles per hour”, and when the ducks took off “all the birds turned aside except one male which flew slightly below and ahead of the airplane. This bird with a burst of speed managed to keep his position in relation to the aircraft for about 1500 feet before finally losing ground and turning aside.” The aircraft’s airspeed was 80 miles per hour; “The 20 miles per hour wind from the west added to the 80 miles per hour air speed would give the bird a ground speed of 100 miles per hour.”

That is the source of every “fastest duck” claim, and it is worth reading precisely. Ducks Unlimited writes that the merganser “attained a top airspeed of 100 mph while being pursued by an airplane”; Thompson’s own paper says 80 through the air and 100 over the ground, and Guinness World Records, which lists the red-breasted merganser as the fastest duck in flight, gives its “maximum recorded level flying speed” as 130 kilometres per hour, or 81 miles per hour. Ducks Unlimited also says the merganser “eclipsed the previous speed record held by a canvasback clocked at 72 mph”. That older figure has a source too: Thompson’s note cites a 1937 US Department of Agriculture circular on the flight speed of birds by Cooke, in which “The fastest speed of a duck that she recorded was that of a Canvasback (Aythya valisineria) with a clocked speed from an airplane of 72± miles per hour” — an aircraft estimate like the merganser’s, and a generation older.

Wind is the difference

Ground speed is what a GPS tag records, and wind is most of the variation. A 2005 study in The Wilson Bulletin followed seventeen satellite-tagged female pintails on migration: “an average groundspeed of 77 ± 4 (SE) km/hr (range for individual flight paths = 40–122 km/hr)”, and “groundspeed averaged 53 ± 6 km/hr in headwinds and 82 ± 4 km/hr in tailwinds.” The birds were not flying harder downwind; the authors concluded that pintails “migrated at airspeeds that on average maximized range and conserved energy.” The extreme end came in April 2024, when GPS-tagged mallards tracked by Tennessee Tech’s Cohen Wildlife Ecology Lab rode a storm north. Winds “gusting over 50 mph on the evening of April 6 pushed” one drake “600 miles from southern Minnesota across the Canadian border in just 8 hours”, and “With this crazy tailwind his top speed recorded on GPS was 99.3 mph!”; a second drake the same day “set a speed record of 103 mph while migrating across southern Minnesota and southeast North Dakota.” Those are ground speeds with a gale behind them, and any retelling should say so.

How high

The altitude record belongs to a mallard nobody saw. On 9 July 1962 a Western Airlines Electra flying between Battle Mountain and Elko, Nevada, struck a bird at “345 knots and an altitude of 21,000 feet.” A single feather was recovered and identified by the feather specialist Roxie Laybourne as “coming from a Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)” — “a right primary, in good condition” — and the record was published in The Wilson Bulletin in 1963. Ducks Unlimited calls it “the highest documented flight by North American waterfowl”. Normal migration is far lower: “Ducks usually migrate at an altitude of 200 to 4,000 feet but are capable of reaching much greater heights.” The strangest altitude fact is a dead one: Ducks Unlimited records that “a 1954 climbing expedition to Mount Everest found a pintail skeleton at an elevation of 16,400 feet.”

How far in a day

At 50 miles per hour a duck that flies through the night covers a long way. Tracking of Arkansas mallards by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, reported by Ducks Unlimited, recorded a drake that “made a remarkable one-day flight in early fall from Saskatchewan to south-central Iowa distance of more than 900 miles!”, and found that “20 percent of the ducks marked in Arkansas during the winters of 2004–2007 returned south the next fall in one nonstop flight.” The endurance champions are geese rather than ducks: “black brant, which migrate nonstop from coastal Alaska to their wintering grounds in Baja California—a journey of roughly 3,000 miles—in just 60 to 72 hours”, losing almost half their body weight on the way. Ducks move behind cold fronts, mostly at night — “Ducks that are in South Dakota one afternoon can be in Arkansas the next morning”, in the words of the ornithologist Sidney Gauthreaux — and the whole journey is in duck migration. Why they travel in formation is a separate question, answered in why ducks fly in a V.

How fast can a duck swim, or run?

Much less is known. Measured swimming speeds exist only for ducklings: in a 1994 study mallard ducklings swam up to 30 centimetres per second at one day old and up to 66 at four weeks, about 1.5 miles per hour. A verified top speed for an adult mallard on the surface, and any speed at all for a duck underwater, we could not find in a source we could check. Walking has been measured on a treadmill: a 2023 study found that “At speeds between 0.26 and 0.73 m/s, mallards adopt a walking gait” and that “At speeds between 0.93 and 1.6 m/s, mallards adopt a grounded running gait” — a brisk human walk — beyond which the ducks “flew with their wings or move backward relative to the treadmill.” Diving ducks, which are built for the water, are described in dabbling vs diving ducks, and which domestic ducks can fly at all is in can ducks fly. To fly a migration yourself, try Flyway.