We have ducks. Writing this, I realize that I phrase this fact in the same way one might announce that they have an infestation, disease, or catastrophe. “We have fleas.” “We have the flu.” “We have a fire in the kitchen.”
But unlike fleas or flu or a contumacious blaze, the ducks we love. Or at least I do, more or less. The ducks are a gift in aggregate, if not a gift that aggravates. They are an exercise in the art of letting go, of making do, of squinting just right in order to see beauty in the wreckage of disillusionment. Of adjusting desires to fit one’s reality.
Like many things people bring home, the ducks first suggested themselves five years ago in an advertisement– an infomercial, really– one that landed via word of mouth. Which is to say, my daughter told me in a phone conversation about watching domestic ducks being cute and friendly on YouTube, how one settled into its owner’s lap, lovingly twining its long duck neck up and around the man’s neck. (“I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck”). Heaven help me, who doesn’t want some of that?
Plus, ducks eat mosquitoes, this daughter said, knowing I loathe mosquitoes (also, like ducks, we have mosquitoes). She didn’t need to say more– she had me at twining– but she finished with: “You should get ducks, Mom, once you’re all settled. Once the house is done.”
Which eventuality– being all settled, with the house done– seemed then, five years ago, far-flung and nebulous, a distant and mysterious world visible only through the strongest, most advanced telescopes, the renderings of the most audacious artist. Frank and I still sigh deeply when we remember the rigors and losses of building (not to mention finishing) this house, whose grounds are now duck infested. In such a gritty state of construction limbo, I could only dream about neck-twining ducks, and do a little duck Googling when I collapsed, bone weary, in bed at the end of a long day. I say “could only”… but really, it was a favorite and seemingly safe escape from drywall dust, paint splatter, grout blisters– and our cramped, dingy rental.
After all, I was just Googling ducks. I wasn’t committed; I was still free of the risks and inconveniences inherent to actual duck ownership. I could safely escape into the fantasy of duck cuteness and connection (and the neatly established, beautiful gardens and arbors, chic barns, and lushly edged koi ponds that naturally went with them), and come back without the slick smear of duck poo clinging to my shoes.
Before, in earlier bouts of home and garden making, we’d just had chickens. Well, and besides the usual cats and occasional dog, two goats (goats were easier for me than dogs, to be honest…I visited them frequently, but didn’t have to live with them, as one must live with a dog– if it is to be well-adjusted. I did sleep a few nights in the goat barn with Eugenia Beliza, our Nigerian dwarf, when we first brought her home and she cried in tormented loneliness, but that’s another story). In my dangerously fluctuating, desert-west world of backyard farming and chronic house-selling/building, the notion of waterfowl seemed remote, irrelevant. Perhaps even superfluous… for chickens reliably provide all the feathered cluckiness (and eggs) that one should need.
But that infomercial. That sly Google, the siren call of a happy cuddly duck echoing in the twilit shadow of a not-quite-finished construction project.
I’ve experienced enough setbacks and disillusionment to know that Googling and YouTube aren’t guaranteed to land one anywhere near the realms of Real Life (not to mention the practical edge of any rose colored distant galaxies). But I was weary then, and vulnerable. The ephemeral glow of what I was reading and watching online about ducks (nest feathers, as it were) bewitched me (ducks begging to be let in at the back door! Ducks cuddling in an owner’s lap! Ducks following their master in a happy quacking row!), even though caveats were mentioned.
Indeed, the caveats seemed to me to be just one more endearing aspect of raising ducks.
Caveats such as: ducks are messy (now there’s an understatement). Duck bloggers and homesteading YouTubers were quick to point this out, but then they were just as quick to share their clever ways of managing or even preventing the mess, and to insist that the benefits of having ducks far outweighed any inconveniences. Benefits such as hardiness and disease resistance. Ducks are said to be tougher than chickens. Drakes are mellow and easy-going, as opposed to raging, lecherous roosters (well, nothing is more amorous than a drake, which is putting it too delicately. But raging? No. They’re lovers, not fighters.) Ducks lay eggs years longer than chickens, and their eggs are bigger and higher in Omega 3’s and protein than chicken eggs. And so on and so forth.
After so many blog articles, a duck’s messiness seemed not only a small price to pay, it even began to add to the appeal. A duck’s messy poo? Great fertilizer; good for the garden– the more the better! A duck’s splashiness? Well, yes, they are splashy, but oh, so cute how they love water! How they manage to fit themselves into even the smallest of dishes in order to eke out a clumsy swim! How they’ll stand quacking happily in the rain, or even a fire hose. How they’ll monopolize the chicken’s water dispenser if they’re sharing space with chickens, like so many gossips clustered around the office water cooler. Funny ducks– the focal point and meaning of any fountain or pond (never mind that their poo will make a pond uninhabitable to koi, whose tolerance for mess is apparently much more limited than duck people’s).
After the house was finally mostly finished and we moved in, Frank and I lapsed into a season of decompression. Evenings, we watched the dumbest TV possible (“The Good Witch”, and “When Calls The Heart”, for instance– so silly). Neither one of us were interested in projects at all— I did manage to hang some pictures, and set my pretty blue sparkly things around the house, which made our new home feel even cosier, all the better to nestle into as we watched even more dumb TV, which sometimes included YouTube’s renditions of duck farming. We did talk about ducks, me with some yearning, Frank with some skepticism, and eventually I conceded to his more objective, practical wisdom; ducks probably weren’t a good idea for us. So much poopy water creating brown slippy ice in the winter was of course prohibitive. We would just do chickens again, chickens who sip daintily from tiny, easily controlled apertures, chickens whose poo dries in a hot second on pine chips, chickens whose eggs were familiar and not at all gamey, chickens whose personalities and demeanors were already beloved by us.
It was spring, just weeks before my birthday, and we began touring feed stores in search of Blue Laced Red Wyandotte chicks, for joy and fun. Frank and I both had our hearts set on this particular breed, because we’d read somewhere that they grow up into especially friendly chickens, and that their egg laying habits are pretty good– above average, even. We had seen with our own eyes at the county fair that Blue Laced Red Wyandottes are just about the prettiest thing that can happen in a chicken coop, red feathers edged with an elegant blue-gray border, the magical conglomerate of all the upper feathers together shimmering like a voluminous satin ball gown over rounded chicken bodies– the soft gray of their fluffy chicken butts a skirted pouf, like ruffled bloomers.
We searched and searched, but never found. At best, there was the vague possibility of Blue Laced Red Wyandotte chicks arriving “sometime in the next couple weeks” at one distant store. At another, there was a calico mix of several kinds of chicks in one enclosure, apparently including at least a few of the coveted Wyandottes, but no one was sure which was which. We were heading home in varied degrees of disappointment, when I brought up the duck proposition once more, for I had seen ducklings at most of the feed stores, and had been guiltily entranced (I was going to say secretly, but my entrancement was no secret; Frank noticed, tolerated, and eventually had to pull me away). By now, it was actually my birthday– the day of. And by now, Frank had taken in a few YouTube videos about installing filtration systems in ponds– we had been thinking in the most galactic terms of a koi pond– and he was intrigued by the possibility of an engineering challenge (Frank is an engineer to his core, which neatly explains how we have managed, ultimately, to clear four house-building event horizons in the last twenty five years).
We agreed to just look at ducklings, and talk about it. In retrospect, I confess the agreement was probably more about Frank’s reluctance to withstand my begging, especially on my birthday… but at the time, I convinced myself that our agreement was fair and just and equitable and furthermore entirely adult. My most significant regret now is not being had by ducks (I mean, having ducks), but dragging Frank down with me.
The ducklings were very cute, arguably cuter than any chick we’d ever seen. And Frank was already scheming about fittings and filters for a duck pond. Where my vulnerabilities to being had lie in nest feathering, his lie in opportunities to play with tech.
So of course we came home with ducklings– two black Cayugas, seven Golden 300’s, settled into two little cartons reminiscent of Happy Meal containers. Nine ducklings, because (I reasoned) we wanted at least four hens for egg laying, and as there’s really no way to determine the gender of a duckling, nine insured the odds that at least four would be hens. (Odds that could be challenged: we talked to a woman at one feed store who’d taken home seven chocolate runner ducklings, all of which ultimately turned out to be drakes). Black Cayugas because supposedly these ducks lay charcoal to black colored eggs, a mystical and wonderful possibility (130-180 eggs a year). Golden 300’s because Goldens are excellent layers (200-to just shy of 300 eggs a year), and their sign said they make good pets (I’d like to see actual data on that now).
Ok, nine ducklings because, really… as each was caught, and plopped into the Happy Meal box, their cuteness exerted such an irresistible gravitational pull on me that I could only respond with “yes, just one more”, until Frank’s uneasiness became an opposing force that I could no longer ignore.
That is how we got ducks (or how ducks got us). Like expansions of plagues and wildfires and even the universe, ducklings too can grow and spread and take over existence as one knows it. First they sweetly took up insignificant space in a crate, a week or so later, the crate outgrown, they barely occupied a big horse trough. Within weeks the trough was stuffed and cluttered with adolescent ducks and I was cleaning soggy, poo-slimed wood chips out of the trough at least twice a day– this lasted until Frank (with some small help from me) built their house and fenced in a roomy yard and small pond (new use for the horse trough) out back. The pond had a very clever but short-lived filtration system (you’d need something on the scale of a municipal sewage treatment facility to keep up with 9 ducks).
Also in the wake of pond filtration failure, we gave five ducks away to innocent bystanders: the two Cayugas… one of them our only drake (a real Beau Brummel– in spirit, and purple-green iridescent attire, with an Elvis curl on his tail); the other a shy black hen who laid barely-gray-not-even-slightly-charcoal eggs; the last three were Golden ducks that we couldn’t tell apart. Four ducks remain, and, because I let them roam outside their yard and into ours, we also have a perpetually poopy back porch. Why they love the back porch, I cannot say– sometimes they line up in front of the sliding glass door and gaze in at us through it– but in the summertime, I can hose it off every day, and it will be splotched again within hours.
Hosing the porch off in winter isn’t an option, but the ducks don’t acknowledge this fact.
As the pond project was ultimately given up, I now scatter large shallow water basins around their yard and ours; I empty and refill these with fresh water daily, because it gets clouded and sludgy with mud and poo so fast, and they use it not only to bathe but also to drink and clean out their sinuses and clear their throats.
The ducks dibble relentlessly. They especially love dibbling under fresh mulch that I’ve scattered in the flower beds. They rake it out over stone edges into gravel paths, popping newly planted flower babies out of their soft borders. Our gravel paths are now permanently covered in displaced mulch. I can rake it all back into the borders one day, and find it covering the gravel the next. To keep the ducks from dibbling under new plant starts, I’ve plunged fences of small, sharp sticks around them, so many soldiers standing at attention. An almost but not quite effective strategy (and to be honest, one that sort of defeats the purpose of planting flowers to look pretty in a border).
Also the ducks love tender shoots of new perennials, baby peas, squash and bean seedlings. They appreciate the ripest, prettiest strawberries, they play croquet with red tomatoes. Their favorite catch is earthworms; I wish they favored squash bugs.
All this last February, our four ducks molted. Feathers are still everywhere– floating in their water, littering our yard and theirs. Feathers have piled up in their house until it is a dung splotched feather bed. And the eggs stopped coming. Not a single egg all month. This of course must be expected when molting happens.
A nation of mice and all the starlings in North America have moved in, attracted by and feeling entitled to our duck’s feed. The ducks welcome their company, eager for outside news.
Three of the giveaway ducks perished at our friend’s home one dark night, at the hands of a raccoon (he came back for their chickens; by then our friend had installed a trail cam to identify the culprit). I confess when I consider the possibility of a raccoon showing up here in pursuit of our four remaining ducks, my knees don’t tremble as much as I would have thought, five years ago. My heart barely skips a beat.
Life with ducks is nothing like the fantasies I indulged in when we were in the midst of house building, or even when we were plopping cute ducklings into Happy Meal boxes. Despite the fact that while they were ducklings, I sat in their trough with them every day and hand fed them; despite the fact that now they recognize me as their source of fresh food, water, and variety shows, and I spoil them with cucumber peels and shredded butternut, my ducks have never, ever twined their necks even remotely near mine. They do not approach me to sit in my lap. They will not even tolerate my petting them. I cannot get near them without their flapping and quacking and running away. Too late I discovered a blogger who commented, “Ducks are scared of anything that isn’t a duck”.
Which turns out to not be entirely true; they welcome mice, starlings, cats, cars– even an ibis that settled into their little flock and shared her adventures in romance and travel with them. (I’m afraid she may have engendered a little worldliness and discontent before she left…
Several times now, one or another has gotten bumblefoot. We capture her (whoever she is– I’ve tried naming them but they look so alike I forget who is who) and I hold her on a towel on my lap (ducks poop once every fifteen minutes, at least), soaking her foot in an epsom salt solution (this works, amazingly enough– afterwards we bind her foot in a poultice of bentonite clay, and keep her quarantined in the old wooden crate with shredded paper until her foot looks better and she can walk on it again). Wrapped tightly on my lap in a towel, hugged against her will to my chest, watching dumb TV with me, she holds statue still, shivering in terror. Occasionally her long elegant neck swivels, so she meets my eyes, and she shivers even more.
I could laugh… or cry. This is as close to a sweet moment as I have gotten with any of my ducks.
Unless… unless I consider the countless times I notice them waddling from the orchard to the gardens, all in a row, or from the border to their house, or from the side to the back yard; here a row of little brown quacks (my mother in law calls them her grandquackers), there a row of sleek wagging boat butts… and I have the sense that they are autonomous, curious, enterprising ladies on tour, dressed up for the occasion; that this is an excursion, an outing, a shopping trip. They stop for hor d’oevres, dibbling, still more or less in a line, clucking and squeak-chirping with delight at their discoveries. Or they line up in the back yard, all in a row, grooming plump breasts with their bills, coyly stretching out a leg, extending a wing like a ballerina.
One disappeared for a week. After she reappeared, disheveled and gaunt, I followed her wanderings that day at a distance and discovered that she’d built (and furnished) a gorgeous, full moon-sized nest, cleverly hidden in almost plain sight in the midst of a huge, shrubby perennial– the nest a perfectly round, tight woven wonder of sticks, leaves, feathers, eggs.
Last fall, I looked out the kitchen window to see them all lined up in their row by a rosebush, frantically quacking, looking towards the slough. Over by the slough, I saw a wild drake and a wild duck lifting in flight towards the mountain. My ducks all in chorus tilted their heads, so one eye each followed the drake and his date, and cried after them. Their anguished quacking almost broke my heart– their only Beau Brummel long ago taken; no real chances of courtship (such as it is for ducks) and motherhood left to them, these flightless brown wallflowers, unable to catch a wild drake’s eye despite their passionate pleading and lovely plumpness.
They seem to always be on my periphery though, from the kitchen window, about the gardens as I work in them, in my comings and goings to and from the house. And they respond always to my proximity, sometimes following me at a distance, scattering when I get too near. They get especially fluttery and frantic if I approach with some unfamiliar object: a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a box, heavy boots, a big hat. They also will appear almost underfoot when I plunge a spade into rich earth, revealing worms. This is as close to me as they ever get.
Their sound and movement when they explore and forage contentedly is of a sort that I cannot take for granted…there’s this curvy, luxurious, clumsy grace about them, this appearance of everything being settled and nearly balanced and in good humor.
And here I must catch my breath…They do that all on their own. I didn’t get my ducks in a row; they lined up all by themselves. Apparently even despite me.
And their eggs. Not ideal; definitely extra. But still, their eggs remain a treasure to me. I’m always delighted to find them. To me, duck eggs are like the acquaintance who talks way too much, but you love them and at least one or two of their stories, so it’s better than ok. We have had, over the last three years up until this month, more eggs than we could use; we have given away dozens of extra eggs (Frank and I are the only household consumers– at four a day, we get a dozen extra quickly). Out of our hearing, one beloved aunt expressed a private dread to one of my cousins, apprehension at the possibility of our giving her any more duck eggs (I know this because families are never great at keeping dark secrets).
Yes, duck eggs are slightly gamier than chicken eggs. Yes, the egg’s texture is stiffer, boingy-er. Whites are almost blindingly white, shells are as tough (I expect) as a dinosaur’s. Scrambled eggs are stiffer, German pancakes made with duck eggs don’t puff up at all… but oh, my! The cakes and crepes, brownies and muffins and pancakes we make with duck eggs–pure magic. Silky, buttery, tender, decadent.
And my gardens. Here is at least one infomercial promise kept: duck poo is indeed an elixir for the garden. Like Windex in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”… so many garden health problems seem to solve themselves with a splash of sludge from a duck bath. Our orchard, which should have drowned in clay already, thrives, reaching to the heavens. The rose bushes are rambunctious; there’s more than enough strawberries and butternut for both the ducks and us for the next two years. Also, while there was high grasshopper pressure the last few summers all around us– one neighbor’s raspberries turned to lace, another had no perennials or roses left at all in her front yard; a local farmer had fruit-laden pepper plants mowed down to stems overnight– the grasshoppers in our yard never reached plague and lace proportions. I would see just a couple here, and another there, leaping out of the strawberries, lunging for a ditch— just enough for brunch and afternoon tea for the ducks.
I cannot say for absolute sure that I owe all the little miracles I’ve mentioned to the ducks, and if it’s not already clear, I must also reiterate that the ducks check off almost none of the cute cuddly pet boxes I thought they would as I indulged in Googly duck fantasies five years ago— but I can also say, despite the poo-flocked back porch, the every-blasted-day chore of refreshing murky duck baths, the endless crises of duck-water ice rinks, mulch-covered gravel paths, displaced petunias, and diminished pea crops, my knees do tremble at least a little, and my heart does skip just a beat, when I consider the possibility of raccoons. Or when, instead of ducks, a muskrat peers in at us from the dark night through our sliding glass door.
