The Ducks

Written September 4, 2015

My kids love the children’s show “Peep and the Big Wide World.” It is about a trio of baby bird friends, a duck (Quack), a robin (Chirp), and a chicken (Peep) who explore the world together and learn and discover all kinds of amazing things. The creators of the show wrote it well enough that it is entertaining to both adults and kids. (For example, a favorite episode centers around Peep and Quack finding a fake duck, whom Quack assumes is real, so they titled the episode “The Real Decoy.” See what they did there??  Hahaha!! ) My favorite character is Quack. Quack is annoying. He is loud and presumptuous and talks or sings all day about ducks and how great they are. And he eats. A lot. He is EXACTLY how I would imagine a duck to act if they could talk and think critically like humans can. Anyhow, Quack is fond of telling stories about how great ducks are. One of my favorite lines in the show is where he simply states: Ducks are the best.

I had chickens growing up. Geese scared me. Other birds, like my sister’s parakeets, were uninteresting and kinda messy. So it never crossed my mind I could have ducks, own them in a flock like I did my chickens, until one day Anya said “Mom, for mother’s day I want to buy you a duck because you like Quack so much.” From that moment on, getting a duck was all I could think about.

But ducks were different: I’d need more than one since they are socially gregarious animals, and though I had a tiny fish pond that could easily hold one bird, any more would be crowded. How to keep my water birds watered? A friend of mine who keeps ducks gave me ideas, such as a kiddie wading pool as a stand-in pond. The rest was easy: they could cohabitate with chickens and the eggs were delicious and plentiful just like a chickens. It was settled. We’d get some ducks.

Soon, in the blossoming springtime of 2014, our favorite feed store started selling the cutest selection of baby Khaki Campbell ducklings. We brought home two yellow fluffballs with huge, flat beaks and large webbed feet. They were so different from the chickens: taller, skinnier, louder, messier, they ate waaaaaay more then the chicks their age. But when they were old enough to go swimming in our fishpond, man were they the cutest damn things you had ever seen!! I had more fun watching their ducky antics. Soon they’d waddle around after the chickens, foraging for slugs in the grasses and quacking on and on and on about, oh I don’t know, probably how awesome ducks are or something like that.

We named them Quack and Zarina. We built a new duck hutch for them to shelter in, and painted the words “Ducks are the best” across the top. The kids decorated the sides with handprints and drawings of Peep, Chirp and Quack.

Soon they were fully grown and I started noticing duck eggs laying around in the oddest of places. They wouldn’t roost in the boxes like the chickens, so I’d see the eggs laying in the middle of the muddy chicken yard, in the middle of the lawn, or hidden in the grasses around an irrigation ditch that parallels the coop. Now, to me duck eggs taste a little like duck meat does: greasy/gamey, a sort of oily flavor that I assume is an acquired taste. From the start I felt they had a somewhat off-putting flavor. But it was nice to know we would reserve the duck eggs every morning for ourselves, leaving the precious chicken eggs for my loyal paying customers whose proceeds were keeping the birds in feed.

Soon, however, the eggs disappeared. My neighbor, an old-timer who had presumably raised or been around farm fowl since before dirt, said ducks will hide their eggs if they realize you’re taking them. I laughed at this, because I had noticed my chickens do the same thing. So every day began a duck egg hunt, though ducks are so much better at hiding their eggs that they are almost impossible to find. In time, we had no more duck eggs, though I doubt it was for lack of laying. (Nine months after giving up the hunt, I found a cache in the tall rushes in the drainage ditch…at least four or five. Most broken open by presumably raccoons. One intact that I broke when I poked it with a stick…man it was stinky!)

Autumn arrived and with it the rains. The ducks loved the water that pooled everywhere in the yard: in the irrigation ditches and drainage canals, in the low spots in the lawn, and would make an adorable snappy-snap sound as they used their bills as shovels to burrow into the rivulets and scavenge for slugs, bugs and all other manner of tasties. They would follow water sources, a rivulet to a pool to the canal to the road and beyond. One night they didn’t return at dusk to be locked into the coop. They were there in the morning, quacking up a storm and waiting impatiently for breakfast. A few nights later they disappeared again, but again were back the next morning.

In early December they disappeared one night and never returned. Their fate is still unknown, though I put out an APB with the neighbors and checked neighboring properties for carcasses or evidence they had moved into any of the five large holding ponds nearby. To no avail. A few weeks later I got a tip they might be at a house across the street, about a half mile away, living with an existing flock of chickens and ducks. I called the house but it was two days before Christmas; nobody answered the call or returned my message. I failed to follow up.

And so we are once again duckless. It is sad, really. They were such a great addition to our farm! I loved their constant, though not irritating, quacking. Their antics were so funny, their run/waddle, their bill-burrowing, their swimming around in water. If we do get ducks again I will provide a bigger and better pond (somehow?) and perhaps more of them to create a better community. For now, I just imagine they are living happily with the neighbor down the street, instead of torn to shreds last winter for some coyote’s meal.

Regardless, I submit to propose the idea that ducks truly are the best.

True story.

“Look,” my daughter said. “They think they’re chickens!”

So cute.