Warwick billed as duck-friendly Uni

**Warwick may have celebrated its ranking as third best university in the country by the Guardian last year, but few know that it also has the third highest duck population too.
**

Website duckdensity.org.uk invites students to rate their campuses based on its duck population, which it calls the “ultimate mark of a university’s prowess and brilliance”.

Out of 16 universities rated, Warwick places third with a ‘Duck Density’ of 7.0 ducks per rood.

A rood is an archaic Old English unit of area, equal to one-quarter of an acre.

“The initial thinking was just to count ducks,” explained Tim Clarke, co-founder of the website, “but to fairly compare different sizes of university we needed to consider the density.

“We looked at different units of measurement and worked out that roods provided sensible values – and rood sounded like something that might be involved with ducks, even though it isn’t.”

Mr Clarke created the website when he graduated from the University of York in 2002, along with co-founder Tom Saddington who graduated the following year.

Mr Clarke and Mr Saddington are now aged 32 and 31 respectively, and work as a refrigeration engineer and a website programmer.

He said that “locations with higher ‘Duck Densities’ tend to have more open space around the campus, and that leads to more relaxed students, and thus an improved environment and ability to study.”

Mr Clarke claims that the measurements on the website are as accurate as possible, but given the nature of the data there is some room for error.

“It takes around half an hour to count the ducks at York, and in that time some of them will have moved to other areas of the lake,” he said.

“There are always going to be ducks hidden on islands or in undergrowth, so we suggest adding ten per cent to duck counts for this reason.”

The University of York topped the table with double the duck population of Warwick at 14.0 ducks per rood.

Spokesperson for York University David Garner says that the duck population there constantly varies, but both campuses have the capacity to support between 500 to 600 ducks.

He said he was pleased with the ranking, as biodiversity is important to the University.

“Feeding them encourages a ‘feel good’ factor amongst campus users,” he said. “They can also prove to be quite a talking point amongst students.”

Warwick University spokesperson Peter Dunn said that it’s hard to count the number of ducks on campus as “hoards of Canada geese get in the way”, though he said that there are 56 types of bird life on campus.

He added that the presence of large bodies of water contributes to the University cultivating a large duck population.