
People love watching animals surf. People don’t always like watching other people surf, ironically. But throw something without opposable thumbs on a wave and somehow the novelty never dies.
But a duck? It’s an animal that’s not exactly out of place in water. They have webbed feet. They swim, and you’d guess there’s more than one duck on the planet that’s figured out how to catch a wave. But according to Kate Miller, a Gold Coast woman who brought home a pet duck one day in 2020, there’s probably no other bird like hers.
“We just had him come along to the beach with us because that’s what we do as a family,” Miller says of the family pet appropriately named Duck. “We would catch a wave and he would just follow us and realized it was fun. And so he wanted to do it too.”
So now Kate and her son take Duck swimming at the beach each day, where he’ll sometimes surf for hours. The funniest part? Duck legitimately froths like the rest of us.
“We all wear sunscreen in copious amounts, And when we open a bottle of sunscreen, he honestly can smell it. And then we watch him in the backyard, just running around in circles as if to say: ‘Yeah, yeah, beach, beach, beach!'”