They occupy heavily vegetated habitats in North and South America as well as the British Isles, France and Spain.

Outside the Americas, ruddy ducks are considered a highly invasive species, prompting many countries to initiate culling projects to eradicate them from the native ecosystem.

The genus name is derived from Ancient Greek oxus, "sharp", and oura, "tail", and jamaicensis is "from Jamaica".

Ruddy ducks have also been nicknamed "butterball", a term used to describe an individual who is somewhat fat, due to their short and stout stature making activities like flying and walking upright awkward.

[2] The ruddy duck was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[4] The ruddy duck is now placed with five other species in the genus Oxyura that was introduced in 1828 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte.

[6] These are small, compact ducks with stout, scoop-shaped bills, and long, stiff tails they often hold cocked upward.

With their short stature, they are known to be great swimmers whilst finding taking flight a much more laboured task.

[10] An interesting physical feature found within this taxonomy of duck is the trachea and stiff-tails’s inflatable air sacs and esophagi which are used in displays.

[15] Though some suspect that the parasitic laying is directly tied to the lack of attunement between the female ruddy duck and the environmental cues.

Ruddy ducks mainly feed on a large amount of plant matter like seeds and roots as well as aquatic insects and crustaceans.

Due to all foraging occurring with substrate clouding the water, the way ruddy ducks select their prey is not through visuals.

They are able to find these organisms in moving waters by using the tip of their bill as it has many sensory endings which direct the duck towards their food.

[10] When searching for randomly placed food patches, Ruddy Ducks sampled previously profitable sites before investigating other areas more frequently than would be expected by chance.

Due to this, a controversial scheme to extirpate the ruddy duck as a British breeding species started; there have also been culling attempts in other European countries.

[25] That implies the species cannot be imported, bred, transported, commercialized, or intentionally released into the environment in the whole of the European Union.