Duck tales

Fine, feathered and confused

(Warning: This post may contain Darwinian outcomes, and is not recommended for the highly sensitive or faint of heart)

Something odd is clearly up with the duck world lately. Over the past few weeks I have experienced not one, but several duck related incidents, and by the way, I do not live on a farm but in midtown Toronto.

For several years now, we have been visited  by a duck couple. Of course they cannot possibly be the same duck couple, but it almost feels like it, as they return each spring, just the pair, to swim and sunbathe in our backyard pool.

I always rather enjoy them. They are very pretty, although of course the male is much prettier, which is annoying, and amusingly tame and sort of oversized looking, like big inflatable toys floating in the pool. Our cat, for instance, completely ignores them, hardly believing they are real birds. They do crap on the pool surround, and leave large feathers about, which I suppose is an annoyance, although it never really bothered me. It’s just so fun to see them awkwardly crash land in the water, ill-built as they are for landing and takeoff, and even if we are sitting outside, calmly float, untroubled, inches away from us in the pool.

But this summer, a couple of weird things happened. First, early one morning, we heard an enormous crash when Mrs Duck flew straight on into the glass window of the kitchen. There was a huge telltale wet spot on the glass, and the poor thing was quite quiet, tucking herself together to collect herself for quite a long while by the pool. I was concerned for a bit that we had a dead duck on our hands, but no, after about an hour, with her better looking husband swimming around (fairly unconcerned looking I might add) nearby, she successfully roused herself and  flew off again, pretty mate in tow.

And then, one morning a couple of weeks later, we were in the kitchen which overlooks our garden making coffee, and Thomas asked, “what are those round balls by the pool?” Indeed, on the north side of the pool, on the cement, was a mess of white-ish globes. Were they eggs of some kind? We went out to inspect, and lo and behold, they were eggs. Big, presumably duck eggs.  Except that they weren’t intact. In fact, they were crashed, with their messy yolks running all over the cement deck of the pool. Clearly the ducks had left some sort of nest and something else–a raccoon? a fox? we had seen a red one running by a few weeks earlier which was already weird for midtown–had discovered it before we did. Which seemed very sad (which is why I didn’t snap a shot for you before we cleaned it all up–it was just too sad a sight to share), and sort of irresponsible of the duck couple. I mean, there they had left us with this crazy nest, somewhere in our garden that was obviously not particularly secure, and they just ran off and left us with all the parental responsibility. What was worse was when they returned, a couple of hours later, and Mrs Duck was looking around frantically, clearly dismayed that her eggs were gone (although of course Mr All Looks was just swimming around unperturbed).  The ducks, who have clearly washed their webbed feet of us and our pool as a nesting location, and to my dismay have not been sighted since.

I had thought my strange duck encounters had come to an end until a couple of weeks ago, when I was at Starbucks in Forest Hill village getting a coffee and a woman ran in, and with great urgency demanded a box from the barista: “There is a mother duck out there with all of her ducklings and they are in the middle of the street!! I need a box immediately so I can take them to the Humane Society!”

Indeed, out on Lonsdale, in the middle of the street, was a mother duck surrounded by two dozen of her fuzzy yellow ducklings–and a screaming crowd of hysterical onlookers taking pictures on their cellphones. As the crowd got larger and people started moving closer in to “help”, Mother Duck, who was clearly a little confused to start with, jumped up on the curb in what appeared to be an effort to get away from the crowd, and her little ducklings, just like in a fairy tale, followed her. Except that–gulp–the spot where Mother had jumped up on the curb was positioned precisely above a sewage grate, and I am dismayed to report that approximately 25% of her charges didn’t make it up on to the curb.

Talk about Darwin in action! People started screaming like they had just witnessed a natural catastrophe. I just had to move on wondering what on earth has happened to the ducks lately–and why I am being visited by such peculiar duck tales.