“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.