There are two things that everyone knows about Star Wars, since all the effort it takes to know these facts is to watch literally 20 seconds of any of the movies. Specifically, that Star Wars takes place:
1. A long time ago.
2. In a galaxy far, far away.
That's all well and good - but why are there ducks on Naboo?
OK, maybe that requires a little bit more explanation. Earth doesn't technically exist in the Star Wars universe. Or at the very least, the events of Star Wars most likely predate our history, and are definitely far enough from the Milky Way galaxy to deserve the second part of that preamble.
Yet despite being infested with banthas, wampas, tauntauns and other creatures unknown to your average joe on good ol' Terra, there are a ton of species that pop up everywhere from Tatooine to Dagobah that aren't the creations of the Muppet workshop, or Lucasfilm, or any number of other companies.
Take ducks, which get referenced a number of times throughout the series ("If we can't get the shield generator fixed, we'll be sitting ducks!"), and appeared in the feathered flesh on the planet Naboo, in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - at least until someone (let's be real, probably George Lucas) caught on, and digitally replaced them with the more fanciful pelikki.
And ducks aren't the only animals that appear in the film series (not to mention the spin-off books, video games, TV shows, and comics, which are a hotbed of accidental panda mentions). When Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padmé (Natalie Portman) have their awkward roll in a field in Attack of the Clones, you can see a bee buzzing around. Dogs have been mentioned multiple times, as have rats - though they've only appeared on screen once, crawling their grubby, pizza-loving claws around Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi.
Jabba's palace is also home to a large frog: the animal he eats grossly is a puppet/prop, but before that it's an IRL frog, that's called a "Klatooine paddy frog" in the context of the movie. Real lizards inhabit Yoda's refugee home on Dagobah, though they're called sleen and nudj in the series, rather than "newts" or "lizards." Even The Force Awakens got into the real animal game, adding some birds to the Star Wars canon - Audubon thinks they may be Northern Gannets and Lund's Petrel - while filming Luke's (Mark Hamill) appearance on Jedi Island at the end of the movie.
And for the Ewok Adventure TV movies, Lucasfilm basically gave up and had a full farm of animals on the Ewok's home moon of Endor, with goats, horses, owls, ferrets and more mixing it up with the tiny teddy bears and their friends.
Beyond the fact that it's sometimes too difficult to shoo a bee off the set when you're trying to film the world's most awkward love scene, and there's just no stopping the rogue indie filmmakers who crafted Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, "there's one more animal in the Star Wars series we haven't mentioned yet that may hold the key to why, in story, these Earth animals keep showing up despite the time and location difference."
And that animal is... [whistle Twilight Zone theme music here] man.
Well, humans, actually. Did you ever notice there are humans in the Star Wars movies? There are! A lot of them! Some of them are even main characters! Beyond the fact that it would be superweird if Lucas had created a series about sentient gas clouds fighting in space, there are at least two good explanations for why humans - and therefore all these other animals - are showing up to Luke's birthday party, which we're pretty sure is the plot of the seven Star Wars movies.
The first is what scientists call "The Prometheus Explanation" [Editor's Note: they don't call it that], based on the hit movie Prometheus. Basically, some other beings somewhere out there in the universe seeded various planets with the same genetic material, leading humans and humanoid beings to develop not just on Earth, but elsewhere.
The other, more plausible explanation is called Convergent Evolution, and it's a real thing that happens on our world, not just in movies. The idea is that animals can develop similar traits, despite being on two evolutionary chains, because those traits are to any animal's evolutionary advantage, not just a singular species.
It's a bit of a stretch to think that humanoids would develop exactly the same, galaxies away from each other; but it's also possible the dudes and dudettes in Star Wars have two livers, or a weird-shaped heart or something like that, and aren't, in fact, exactly the same: they just appear that way on the outside.
Same with bees, and rats, and frogs, and Northern Gannets. With hundreds of planets in the Star Wars galaxy, it's entirely possible that every iteration of Earth animal exists in Star Wars, alongside womp rats and rancors.... Which means, somewhere on Coruscant, people are probably as obsessed with sloth GIFs as we are.
And that, my friends, is why there are ducks on Naboo.
