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Ducks were probably domesticated about 2,500 years ago, but wild ducks were for sure eaten by the ancient Egyptians and Romans. There is also
archeological evidence that wild ducks were eaten by Iron Age folks.
Alessandro Fillippini, the chef of New York's Delmonico's, the most famous restaurant in the 19th-century U.S., called duck "the king of birds, and no game is more highly praised or more eagerly sought after in Europe than our [wild] American canvasback ducks."
Yet in 1873, a Yankee Clipper sailing ship brought to the U.S. nine
domesticated Peking ducks, breeding stock for what became known as Long Island ducklings, the most commonly eaten duck in the U.S.
In China, flocks of ducks are brought in to obliterate plagues of locusts in their nymph stages, when the insects cannot fly. This gives the ducks fine high-protein fodder and giving Chinese farmers free fertilizer for their fields. Ducks are also used there to control land crabs, which can devastate rice paddies.
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