Another Day in the Country
Let’s talk about ducks
© Another Day in the Country
For being creatures that I knew very little about and about whom I was only moderately curious, ducks have proven to be very interesting as a little German soldier used to say on the iconic “Laugh In” show back in the day.
I’m constantly learning something new.
A while back, when I thought my ducks finally had stopped laying, I found out that they were experts at hiding eggs, often in plain sight.
Their nests are frothy concoctions built of hay, feathers, and mud. Sometimes the ducks drag so much mud in on their feet that the bottom floor of the nest has a layer of mud on it.
The first time the ducks hid their eggs from me, I found a few loosely covered with feathers and hay so that the nest looked empty at first glance.
Then I discovered that the edges of supposed fluff around the outside of the nest were full of eggs, like one of those pizzas with extra cheese piped into the crust.
Not only did the ducks hide eggs inside the nest and around the nest. They also hid them on the bottom floor of the nest. That was getting really ingenious.
I have on a couple of occasions found a couple of dozen eggs in, under, and around the nest.
The ducks also get creative outside of the nest — say, in the yard. Since my fenced-in area isn’t high enough for me to stand up inside it, I have to hunker down to retrieve anything inside the duck pen.
I categorically just plain refuse to be rescuing eggs laid helter-skelter out in the pen.
Inside their enclosure, the ducks go to great pains at times to hide eggs that supposedly are lying there in plain sight.
They don’t have a really clear notion, however, of what an egg can hide behind. They think that a bump in the ground or a tree branch is good enough.
One day, I came out to find an egg propped on end behind a branch that had fallen into the pen. This must have taken quite a bit of time, and after all that balancing work, the duck didn’t know I could still see the egg because the branch was too slender to cover the width of a duck egg.
The ducks always are playing in mud around their watering dish. Even when it doesn’t rain, they splash water out to make mud and sometimes fill their mouths with water and deposit it outside the pan onto the dirt to assist the mud-making process.
I’ve read that ducks get nutrients from the mud they are diddling around in. And diddling they do. Every couple of weeks, I have to completely empty their big tub because the ducks have filled it with dirt.
Long ago, I stopped trying to keep their water clean. They love muddy water. Fresh, sparkling clean water is like an Olympic challenge for those ducks.
“Let’s see how fast we can fill this up with dirt,” Daffy says to Daisy, and before you know it, the lot of them are messing around between the dirt and the dish.
This causes quite a crevice beside the big old watering hole for the ducks.
When I come to add water to their tub, they quack and carry on, pointing with their beaks, gesturing with their necks for me to squirt water around the tub, not just into the tub.
When I obey, they are delighted. They dance, believe it or not, bobbing and weaving with their guttural quacking, letting me know that I’m doing exactly what they’ve been wanting all along.
I came out to fill the tub the other day when it was hot. Four very messy ducks with mud all over their beaks and heads greeted me.
I’d thought they still had plenty of water, but it was 90% mud with a little froth on top, so I just dumped it back into the miniature Grand Canyon they have excavated around their water dish.
They were thrilled and proceeded to get even muddier, so I squirted Daisy with my hose. She turned head on into the water and let me hose her off until she was clean.
The other ducks watched. Daffy moved closer so she could get into the stream of water falling from the end of the hose. Now there were two of them, blinking and bobbing, enjoying being sprayed.
I tried it on the Duchess, but she’d stand there for a minute, couldn’t take the pressure, and would back off.
Duke, the drake in Duckville, kept sidling into the edge of the sprinkling and would stay close so long as it wasn’t directly aimed at him.
They know when strangers are in the yard and are constantly watching for marauders from above.
They know the pond is the safest place for them to run if danger threatens, and they know when I come outside carrying peas it is time for them to go inside.
How do they know I have peas? Can they smell them? Surely, they don’t always assume I have them in my pocket.
This and more I’ve learned about ducks. They call to me when they are hungry. They laugh when they play and compliment me when I get what they want.
Duke the Drake even knows that when my sister Jess is out duck watching, he’d better mind his manners and stop dunking the girls under water or she’ll unflinchingly whop him over the head with a bamboo leaf rake — a handy way to keep things orderly on another day in the country.