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!]

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.