Mother's Day Ducklings

Last week, we found the duck, nestled in thick bushes on another part of our rooftop. The bird we’d assumed had decided against close human contact and battling two flights of stairs this year, had returned.

Questions regarding the intelligence of that choice aside, we were stuck with a belated discovery and no way to measure an estimated time of arrival of the ducklings. According to Google, we’d learned last year that mallards will lay an egg every one to two days. Once she has laid her entire clutch, the clock to duckling time starts. During this 28-30 day period, we noticed last year that the duck started to line her nest with downy feathers. Approximately 10 hours after hatching, the ducklings are dry and ready to leave the nest for the closest body of water. This year, by the time we found her new nest, the duck had already lined her nest with her feathers. There was no way to estimate when the ducklings were due.

Google will tell you that ducklings normally hatch at night and thus are ready to leave the nest around early morning. I will tell you that in the past two years, this has not been the case.

Last year, my dad, curious about the duck, wandered up to the roof and found a cluster of ducklings huddled in a corner of the rooftop in the late morning. This year, parental concern for children that are neither human, nor mine, had me checking the roof to make sure that the enthusiastic cawing of crows wasn’t related to a duckling lunch.

I was wrong. I saw a tuft of downy, dark brown fur on the stairs and sprinted up to the roof, anticipating a bloodbath. Instead, I found two giant crows eyeing a mallard that was attempting to find cover in a completely exposed area. With her eleven ducklings. I screamed. My currently hard-of-hearing parents didn’t hear me. I screamed again (and again and again) while making large frantic circles with my arms to shoo away the crows.

Once my parents recognized my screaming, our scant, half-joking preparations, consisting of several pieces of cardboard, were speedily produced. Stairs were navigated much more smoothly this time, even with 11 ducklings trailing behind her. Two neighbors we happened to run into took a piece of cardboard each and helped us herd the duck towards water.

We chose to take a side street this time, to avoid the traffic on the main street that the duck had chosen last year. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday, and taking side streets meant children.

I have no beef with children. I think most of them are fun and hilarious. Although I have none of my own, I understand that raising children is a feat in itself and that sometimes, even if the parents are both certified saints, they can end up with a kid with a shitty attitude. I don’t blame the child for whatever antisocial behavior results. I just blame the parents.

 And that’s exactly what I did when some 8-year-old shouted at us that we were “SO MEAN” for “CHASING THAT DUCK.” He repeated it before his mother let her uncontrollable child down off of her bicycle and he proceeded to try to get as close to the duck as possible. Another child, a girl of about 10 to 12, did the same, repeatedly running towards the duck. I asked both to stop, to not get too close and frighten her. They looked at me, like they were testing how much they could get away with, while they continued their shitty behavior. Their respective parents did nothing.

Given that my own mother would have had no problem beating me in public if I actually yelled at the kids, I held my tongue. The duck nearly ran past the bridge, terrified of the press of children crowding her. She finally recognized the river and flew down; we helped the ducklings onto the ledge while the human children reached out, desperate to touch a duckling for no reason than to say that they’d done it. After the ducklings were all safely in the river with their mother, the strangers we had collected along the way made small talk about the ducks. Meanwhile, the children and their respective parents vanished, without so much as a disingenuous apology for the trouble.

“Oh, stop, they’re kids, they can’t help themselves,” my mom said later.

“Can’t help themselves? I didn’t act that way when I was their age,” I said.

“Well, just because you didn’t, doesn’t mean-“ she started.

“Oh that’s funny, you know why?” I said, “because you made sure I didn’t.”

“Ok, ok,” my dad interjected. I dropped it because I knew I was right. My mom dropped it because she either knew I was right but didn’t want to be the bitch I’m not afraid to be, or couldn’t believe the heartless asshole I’d become. Either way, she knew, and I knew that she knew, that it could have been a lot worse. That at the very least, she didn’t raise a shitty kid.

[This is a long video but I got a lot more footage this year and felt it would be a shame to make a shorter one. Enjoy!]

Operation Mallard

I recently applied for a job that required a timed cognitive test that was supposed to discern how quickly I could reason and solve problems. “Reason,” in this case was defined as the ability to calculate percentages and add large numbers without a calculator. It was probably not a great idea to aspire to intellectual heights on a random Wednesday, but a delusional sense of optimism won out.

It went relatively badly. Seconds evaporated as I attempted to remember how to add, divide, and multiply. The test told me I wasn’t nearly as smart as I’d hoped.

The uncomfortable amount of stress sweat dampening my armpits affirmed that I probably wouldn’t enjoy a position where I was required to calculate 34% of 620 within five seconds. At the very least, I was now free to work from home and avoid stressful situations.  

Less than twenty-four hours later, I was standing on the second flight of internal stairs leading to our rooftop, surrounded by leaping ducklings running towards a distressed mother honking angrily one flight down. The Internet had informed us that mallards will depart from their nest around sunrise; an earlier morning check had confirmed no ducklings were present. My father went to take a casual look around noon and found six ducklings and their mother stuck in on our enclosed rooftop. Chaos then ensued.

“Get them!” my own mother said, shoving a cardboard box at me.

As I scooped the adorable, fluffy, helpless things into the box, they leapt out of confinement, scattering along the staircase. They ran towards each other, huddled, then tumbled down the remainder of the stairs where their mother was frantically pressing herself against a window looking out to a balcony. Outdoor access was still one more flight down.

The problem with ducks is that they apparently cannot descend stairs. The mother mallard would hop down one step and look back to have her children follow. She would hop down another step, lose her balance, then half fall, half fly down the stairs. The ducklings would rush to follow and launch themselves head over tail.

Once outside, another issue presented itself. The duck went the wrong way. Spooked by a passing truck and admiring pedestrians, she walked in the opposite direction of the nearest body of water. She only agreed to leave after a couple of crows made their appearance in the lower branches of nearby trees. My mother pointed her umbrella at the nearest crow as my aunt and I used our bodies to direct the duck towards water.

Finally on the right path towards the river, we relaxed. Until we noticed that the storm drains situated on the side of the street were just slightly bigger than a duckling. Scrambling together and over each other to keep up with their mother, the ducklings seemed unconcerned with this obvious danger. Three minutes later, two fell in.

Stressful situations are useful in that they show you the character of a person. First, we all gasped. Next, my mother immediately said we had no choice but to leave them. My aunt agreed. The duck stopped in her tracks, realizing that she was two ducklings short. I looked down the storm drain and saw two ducklings staring upwards, chirping for help.

The storm drain wasn’t deep, the bottom was within arm’s reach. I had to try. I inserted my hands into the two slots and pulled. The lid shifted, then rose off the street. Then, to my mother’s horror, I laid down and dived head first into a cloud of mosquitos to scoop up two squirming distressed baby ducks.

I am convinced that ducklings are heart-meltingly adorable to ensure that humans will be less likely to drive over them. We stopped cars whose drivers’ faces lit up at the subjects of our exhausted escort. By now on the main street in my town, couples holding hands, older ladies on bicycles, kids coming home from baseball practice, all stopped to take pictures. It was only several days later that I realized I’d never seen a mother duck strutting along the street with her young, in Tokyo. For about fifteen minutes, we navigated around a parking lot where, at one point, the mother duck hid in some bushes, panting and stressed. It was a convenient hiding place from pedestrians but it didn’t lead to water. My aunt managed to inadvertently get it out of its hiding place by trying to “cool it off” by pouring water on it.

Another 100 meters of public sidewalk populated by too many people, and we were able to push the duck gang into a side street that led straight to the river. With less people on the street, the mother duck seemed to perk up and waddled forwards more confidently. A car slowed behind us and when it finally passed, almost motivated the duck to turn into another, unrelated side street. I blocked it by standing in the middle of its path; it eyed me with frustration before proceeding to the bridge just up ahead.

The Kanda River is the kind of river you’d expect to see in central Tokyo. Greenish-brown, shallow water flows between tall concrete banks. There are shrubs and cherry trees planted on the tops of the concrete banks, but the river itself appears more like a man-made canal contained for the sake of real estate development. You’d never want to swim in it, but it looks like it has enough creepy crawly things inside to keep water fowl well fed.

The duck stopped at the middle of the bridge and looked at the river, almost pleased at the view. Honking again, she launched herself into the air and down to the water. The ducklings looked on, huddling on the edge of the bridge. It was a good ten meters down. As I stood up to get a picture of the ducklings before they forever left us, one leaped over the edge and dropped into the water, immediately bobbing up to the surface like a cork. The others prepared to take the plunge when I saw my mother’s hand shove them off the edge. She would later claim that it was to keep them from returning towards the street. In reality, I think she was just tired of dealing with them.

They swam away, all six ducklings with their mother, down the river. We cheered, our faces red from the heat and sun. Since then, my mother has said she doesn’t want it to come back, that she doesn’t want to worry about another duckling parade again.

 Deep down, though, she totally does. A couple days ago, she asked me where we should keep the trellis guard in the meantime, while we wait for next year. She’s been sharing videos of the ducks with friends and neighbors. As for me, I’d happily welcome this kind of yearly aptitude test. 

[For a video I put together of the adventure, see below!]

What the Duck?!

“I think it’s a duck,” my mother said.

It was brown, she went on, and there wasn’t a beak, but a bill. It was a duck.

This belief was instantly shot down for its general absurdity. Why would there be a duck nesting in a bush on our rooftop? It had to be a mistake, we said, you just saw it wrong. Don’t ducks hang out near water, anyway? It was probably a pigeon, or one of the turtle doves that are all over our neighborhood. Or some other drab looking bird. Certainly not a duck.

The most recent event to come crashing through my life was precipitated by my dog, who had suddenly insisted on staring at the end of one of the planters situated on the roof. Our rooftop is an area where our dogs, past and present, have been able to run around, and where we hang laundry to dry. Our first dog would slide under the fencing enclosing the rooftop and jump up on the roof’s ledge for the full aerial view of his domain. He eventually launched himself off the edge chasing a crow. Fortunately, he landed in a flower bed about a story and a half down and was fine; we set up cinder blocks underneath the fencing to prevent him from ever gaining access to free fall again.

Those cinder blocks have since become homes to the occasional gecko. Despite my present dog’s general fear of most moving things, she enjoys pressing her nose up to the crevices between the cinder blocks where geckos have taken shelter from the elements. Once she finds a resident gecko, she’ll check up on it at every opportunity.

So when she expressed intense interest at a particular area of our rooftop, whining and sniffing, my mother assumed it was another gecko. She lifted up the dog to show her there was nothing of interest in the planter. Instead, my dog attempted to lunge at something in the bushes that turned to peer towards my mother.

It wasn’t a gecko. It was, we later confirmed, a duck.

This has complicated the general uneventful nature of my life. While the rooftop choice was a wise one in terms of avoiding stray cats and palm-faced civets, the unfortunate timing of having our hedges cut back meant that the duck became more exposed than it should have been. We worried about crows finding it. There’s also the ticking timebomb of ducklings who are somehow supposed to jump down three stories, not die, then walk towards the nearest river without getting run over or picked off by crows. That then presents a moral question: do we stop traffic and ensure the ducklings’ safe return to the river, or do we let nature take its course and allow everything between our house and the nearest body of water decimate the entire brood?

These are all questions and issues I wasn’t ready to voluntarily spend my time thinking about. Nor was the rest of my family. My father told me that he hoped everything worked out for the duck. My mother told me she was too busy to deal with it. Besides, didn’t the duck think things through before making a nest on a rooftop? It must have a plan, right?

Ironically, it was my mother who discovered crows lurking around the nest, quietly plotting death. She texted me with surprising speed.  

When I say “crows,” you might imagine the typical black birds, larger than a pigeon but smaller than a hawk, that might be found near the occasional trashcan or in a Hitchcock film. In Japan, that word refers to a bird the size of a raven that looks like it’s been supersized with steroids. If normal crows were your average human, Japanese crows are Ronnie Coleman. There are stories of Japanese crows dropping kittens on train tracks to kill them, plucking small animals out of zoo enclosures, and snatching food from pedestrians. They’re smart, aggressive, and from what they’ve buried in our planters, particularly enjoy fatty Chinese food.

With the crows fleeing the scene but calling in reinforcements from a neighboring rooftop, we decided to put together a protective guard around the nest. If only to avoid discovering a murdered mallard on her rooftop, my mother came up with the idea of tying two small wire trellises together, then attaching plastic spiked mats made to prevent stray cats from using our yard as a giant toilet, as a further crow deterrent.

Predictably, the duck fled once we placed the contraption over her nest, bursting out of the hedge and quacking in angry distress. It paced around the rooftop as we tried to secure the trellis in place on both sides, my mother telling it that we’d be done soon and asking it not to be upset. It ejected a stream of putrid poop and flew off.

If you’ve never smelled wild mallard poop before, I advise you never to seek the opportunity. What came out of that duck smelled like a mixture of rotten sewage, fish that went bad about a year ago, and wild animal sweat. Even after we hosed down the area, went inside, and vigorously washed our hands, the smell seemed to cling to the insides of our nostrils and our clothes. No wonder my dog found that duck.

I suspect that, at that point, my mother was hoping that it wouldn’t come back. About forty minutes later, I found the duck standing in front of our newly built structure, eyeing it with suspicion and resentment. When I peeked at the planter about twenty minutes later, the duck was securely situated on top of her eggs. She turned and gave me the stink eye.

“You ingrate,” I said as I scanned the sky, rooftops, and telephone lines for any avicidal shadows.

For the present, she seemed safe. If she doesn’t get eaten, Google tells me her eggs will hatch in 30 days. That buys me a month to build a couple crash pads, a ramp, and possibly a sign so I don’t get run over along with the ducks.

Wish us luck, guys.