Lonesome Duck
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The Lonesome Duck is a character in The Magic of Oz, the thirteenth of the fourteen Oz books written by L. Frank Baum; he makes brief but gaudy appeareances in two of the book's later chapters.
The Lonesome Duck first appears in Chapter 15, while Cap'n Bill and Trot are trapped on the Magic Isle in the Gillikan Country. He swims "swiftly and gracefully" over to them, astonishing them with his "gorgeously colored plumage." The common Mallard is famous for his sleek green head feathers, and the Pink-headed Duck is, well, pink around the head; but the Lonesome Duck is flashy all over:
"The feathers were of many hues of glistening greens and blues and purples, and it had a yellow head with a red plume, and pink, white and violet in its tail."
In a brief conversation, the Duck explains that he's lonesome because "I haven't any family or relations." The bird tells Trot that he can't make friends, "because everyone I meet—bird, beast, or person—is disagreeable to me," though one has to suspect it's the other way around. He "used to know the reason" he's the only duck in the Land of Oz—"but I've quite forgotten it." He lives in a diamond palace where his food is magically supplied to him. Though he cannot help free the two protagonists from their entrapment, he makes it slightly easier to bear, by conjuring large magic toadstools for them to sit on. (His words are rather unpleasant, his actions more positive. Some beings are like that.)
In chapter 17, the rescue party searching for Trot and Cap'n Bill—consisting of Dorothy Gale, The Wizard, The Cowardly Lion, The Hungry Tiger, and Bungle the Glass Cat—almost stumbles over the Lonesome Duck's diamond palace, earning them a stern rebuke form its inhabitant.
(The text never specifies the Duck's gender, referring to it consistently in the third person—yet the avian rule is that the gaudier birds are the males. The Duck makes its loneliness a point of pride; readers can decide for themselves whether this behavior is more suggestive of a male or a female.)
