From the Hollywood Squares TV show:
And just for the record: Roosters crow all night long.
This thread’s quacking me up.
Ducks quack on a casual and conversational basis during the day? Cool. I wonder if their conversations are all they’re quacked up to be.
::d+r::
Am I being whooshed? 
The building is dormitory style with doors at each long end. Someone invariably leaves a door open, a bird flies in, realizes he has seriously screwed up, and naturally flies upwards, which is the stairway to the second floor. The situation deteriorates from there. 
It hasn’t happened yet this Spring. Maintenance will kill them with a broom, and I, being a wimp try to capture and release them first.
Geese:
Geese most certainly make noise at all hours. We live on a lake with many groups of giant canada geese, probably 100 - 200 individuals all told. As they settle in for the evening an hour or so after suset the constant calling slowly dies off. But then something happens out there and they start up a racket again, only to quiet down in a couple minutes. By late night you only occasionally hear a soft honk now & again, but it’s rare to go any 10 minutes over any night without hearing at least one honk.
They don’t ‘fall asleep’ like you’re thinking. They are just calmed down due to the lack of light. It’s a common way to quiet a restless bird, cover their eyes or throw a towel over their cage.
Do dogs bark at these loons?
May be agitated, or not able to sleep? One lonely duck started quacking at 10:30 pm, loudly. Put the flashlight on him to see if he was threatened by anything as he was on the edge of small lake, standing on grassy edge, outside of windows. Water in lake was still, he was moving his head around in light, but would not move body. He did slow down with the light and was told to “keep quiet.” Eventually, it stopped, but no attack sounds. This was a first for us. Hysterical to hear.
How did you know the goose was three years old? 
After 10 years of letting sleeping ducks lie they have been awaked to quack yet again.
But do their quacks echo? Are we perhaps hearing these echoes just now after a round-trip distance of some 66 million miles?
I am glad this thread was revived so that an important observation could be made.
This is the worst opening line of a mystery novel ever. :mad:
I think in order to address the question of OP’s decade-old dignity, we must answer the question: when ducks quack at night, do they sound like frogs?
Of ducks at night in Provence I cannot speak. Though I mightily wish to visit and thence learn of them.
But I have lived on a large lake in the US Midwest near a small island therein. From this sublime experience I can say that Canada Geese in large number definitely have an elaborate ritual of each honking goodnight to each and every flock-mate in turn before retiring for their well-earned nightly rest.
Only to be aroused several times overnight by the wind, a squirrel, or perhaps the motion of the Moon. Each incident of which requires thorough discussion by the assembled multitudes. Who, after thoroughgoing debate having eventually reached consensus on the cause and effect of the disturbance at hand, and duly having voted a collective response thereunto, must then each wish every other in turn a good night and most pleasant sleep.
Until awakened anew by the next squirrel, Moon, or what have you. What a busy nocturnal life these eminently social and voluble creatures lead. Who indeed knew that so few brain cells could trigger so much discussion on so many topics of urgent interest?
"Loons break the silence
Wake him from the dead of night
Fido is stirring
He’s convinced that noise ain’t right
Then when he’s heard what he’s waiting for
Listen in awe and you’ll hear him
Bark at the loon!"—With apologies to Ozzy Osbourne.
I live by a creek that has ducks as long as there is open water. Their quacking usually settles down at dusk; quacking at night could give away their location to a predator, and we do have hawks, raccoons, opossums, etc. in this neighborhood.
That reminds about something I have been meaning to research. When a cricket gets into my basement, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint the location of the sound. I’m wondering if that’s an adaptive property of the kind of sound that crickets make, and if so what is that property exactly? I tried walking around outside several times to try to discern if the same were true outside, i.e. away from the basement where sound was bouncing around the walls; but results were inconclusive, too many of them calling at the same time.
Sounds with very complex waveforms seem to be harder for humans to directionally track. Likewise intermittent sounds if they’re real short. It seems as if the direction-finding algorithm starts over for each burst of sound.
I discovered this effect through an annoying experiment. Years ago in the service I worked in an open plan office space about 20x40 feet with 8 people at big traditional Steelcase desks. No cubicles, sound deadening walls, etc.
We each had a traditional 1960s style multi-line telephone with a traditional mechanical ringer on it. Often people were not at their desks and their phone would ring. There were 5 different departments spread across the 8 desks so not everybody had the same phone numbers appearing on their phone. When an unoccupied desk’s phone rang on a number you didn’t have on your phone, which they did every few minutes all day long, you had to jump up and hustle over there to pick it up and take a message. Leaving it to ring unanswered was simply Not Done.
It was effortless to direction-find the ringing desk(s). It rang, you looked up and knew which desk it was instantly.
Then the base got a “modern” Centrex phone system whose single line phones all had electronic ringers. They programmed the Centrex to ring the same primary number as before on each desk and left all the fancier features blank.
When one of those warbling twittering electronic ringers went off at another desk it was flat impossible to know where the sound was coming from. And we were all young and still had good high frequency hearing. Didn’t help. You just couldn’t home in on the noise; each twitter came from here, there, and everywhere. Just as your brain started to converge the ring paused, only to start over a second or two later. It was the same mental impression as a word “on the tip of your tongue”. You know you’ve almost got it, but you have no insight into what that approximate solution is.
This was annoying as hell. After a couple weeks of all of us bitching about it and lots of calls getting answered late or not at all while somebody played Chinese firedrill running around the room hunting the ringing phone, we’d had enough. I knew a bit about Centrex programming and called the commo department. I got a sympathetic tech on the line who appreciated that I spoke phone. A couple minutes later we had appropriate hunt groups for the related desks and a pick group for all the phones. Office life got much better after that.
I really wonder why Bell Labs (as they then still were) ever settled on that noise for a ringer? It was utterly unsuitable for its mission.
That’s interesting. I can imagine that testing for this just never occurred to Bell Labs, I’m not sure I would have anticipated it as a possible issue.
Funnily enough, I (coincidentally) have the “crickets” ringtone on my phone - it’s not an uncommon choice, and it’s probably not a good one if you’re in a crowded room trying to figure out whose phone is ringing.
From a distance I get the confusion. They’re less strident when they’re just paddling along, with a bunch of coin coins every now and then.