Rubber duck washes up on Scottish beach 18 years after it was released in Ireland
If you’ve got a duck as a bath toy, you may not rate its swimming skills especially highly.
They often topple onto their sides, looking a bit sad in the bubbly water. But don’t underestimate the stamina of the humble plastic duck – as this one proved.
It bobbed all the way from the River Liffey in Dublin to the north of Scotland in 2024, where it was picked up on the island of Stronsay in Orkney.
Filip Miller, 13, who spotted it on the beach while walking his dog, took it home to show his mum Marion.
They noticed it was was marked with the words ‘World Record Duck Race, Ireland 2006’, and a quick Google revealed that 150,000 ducks like this one were released to try and break the record for the largest ever plastic duck race.
The ducks involved had other ideas, however, and some went in the wrong direction from the mile they were meant to travel. Organisers were unable to collect them all and several escaped into the sea.
Some went wildly off course, with one even ending up in Sweden and others found in Morecambe and the Isle of Wight.
This latest straggler went on an Odyssey around the British Isles before being found 423 miles away.
Marion said: ‘Somebody had said it was a shame that this little duck had bobbed all the way from Ireland just to go in the bin – but he’s definitely not going in the bin. I don’t think we’ll keep him in the bath, but we’re definitely going to keep it on the shelf!’
The duck was an unusually cute piece of plastic pollution – but it’s a good reminder of how long the things we throw away can spend drifting around in the water, mostly unchanged even after decades.
And the rubber ducks in the Dublin race are far from the only ones to be drifting aimlessly for miles around our oceans.
In fact, a whole armada of them was accidentally dumped into the Pacific in 1992, after around 28,000 fell from a shipping container in a storm.
The ‘Friendly Floatees’, plastic bath toys including yellow ducks and blue turtles, have since washed up all over the world, including Alaska, Hawaii and Japan.
Some are thought to have reached the Arctic and become trapped in ice there, while others are endlessly circling on the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre current.
They were so numerous and indestructible that they even helped oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer to map ocean currents by tracking where they ended up, using models to predict where they would next wash up.
The toys became famous and are now collectors’ items – but although the idea of rubber ducks set free on the seven seas may be amusing, the reality of plastic pollution is anything but.
It has been over ten years since the last known Floatee washed ashore, but thousands are out there along with all the carrier bags, old netting and crisp packets dumped into the oceans each year.
Unfortunately, it’s more likely that they’ll end up on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of floating rubbish than make it into the hands of a kid on a beach – but at least this one in Orkney had a happy ending.
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