Move over, anonymous pond ducks of the world — one unusually leggy waterfowl has achieved what most of us can only dream of: a bronze statue in his honor.
Long Boi was a mallard-Indian Runner cross who called the University of York’s Derwent College pond his home, and he was, to put it scientifically, absolutely massive compared to his short-legged contemporaries. Standing approximately 70 centimeters tall, Long Boi loomed over his fellow pond residents like a feathered giraffe at a duck convention.
His road to fame began in 2021 when a Reddit post declared him the tallest mallard ever recorded — at over a meter tall. This was, factually speaking, completely wrong. Long Boi was not a meter tall, and he wasn’t even a pure mallard. But here’s the beautiful thing about the internet: nobody cared. The post went viral anyway, because sometimes a gloriously tall duck is simply what humanity needs, facts be darned.
Students at the University of York embraced their elongated amphibious celebrity with the kind of wholehearted enthusiasm normally reserved for championship sports teams. Long Boi became campus royalty, accumulating fans, social media followers, and the general adoration that his perfectly ordinary (but much shorter) pond-mates could only watch with what we can only assume was deeply envious quacking.
And now, in the grandest tradition of honoring those who have captured our collective hearts through absolutely no deliberate effort whatsoever, Long Boi has been immortalized in bronze. The statue stands as a permanent tribute to a duck who simply had the audacity to grow unusually tall and let the internet do the rest.
Somewhere out there, very short ducks are reconsidering their life choices.
*Source: Boing Boing / Wikipedia*
Original story via Boing Boing
