I dedicate this shot to Minda, as a belated gift for her HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!, and to Corey (Coreyblack) who has come back from the hospital (WELCOME BACK!!!). The shot was taken in a wonderful Botanic garden in New Brunswick last summer. At the end of the caption you'll find the solution to the question: is the waterfowl taking off on the pond shore a duck? The duck test is a humorous term for a form of inductive reasoning. This is its usual expression: ' If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. ' The test implies that a person can identify an unknown subject by observing that subject's habitual characteristics. It is sometimes used to counter abstruse arguments that something is not what it appears to be.Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849�1916) may have coined the phrase, but the phrase was later popularized in the United States by Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., United States ambassador to Guatemala during the Cold War in 1950, who used the phrase when he accused the Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán government of being Communist. According to another version the father of this phrase was a different person. The Turing Duck Test is an assay developed by Alan Turing (1912-1954) to determine whether a subject is a human or a duck. Turing, though most famous for his eponymous Turing Test, a procedure to determine whether a subject is a man or a robot, actually devised dozens of experiments to determine whether people are, in fact, human beings. While the Turing Duck Test is rarely employed today, it did give rise to the often-misattributed Turing Hypothesis: 'If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.' Solution: it isn't a duck, because it neither walks nor quacks. ;D Thank you for your kind comments.