Duck Walks Not As Crow Flies
Monday, May 4th, 2009(Click here if you’d like to see the pictures but the shockwave slideshow doesn’t display or link to the photo album for you.)
In 2008 a Mallard drake and hen started hanging around our house. In April 2008 and 2009 the hen roosted under an Azalea by a brick planter in front of our door. My family quickly named her Louellen. In 2008 we kept up with her incubation and hatching, but missed the most amazing moment, the exit from the nest and one-time journey to water. But not this year. Having heard the ducklings the night before, and knowing their hen would most likely lead them on their precarious journey at dawn, we rose at 5:30 AM and took turns watching through our front window until she emerged.
The small lake we knew she would lead them to is less than a half mile from our house, as the crow flies. But she is not a crow. And with eleven ducklings in tow, she would not fly. So instead she waddled, walked, waded, paused, ate, rested, and reversed track for three hours around houses, over yards, across streets, under vehicles and signs, through puddles (where the ducklings took their proto-swims), up curbs, into a diversionary koi pond, but finally to the lake itself, where her journey’s work was not completed until she had warned off a too-interested drake.
So let’s say ducks have no consciousness and no worth beyond their utility for humanity. That’s no reason for those of us who do have consciousness and moral value not to be amazed at the beauty of creation and at the protection and guidance one little hen provides her otherwise helpless clutch of followers. Hmm. Helpless followers.
Click on a picture to see it, or the entire album or a slideshow, full-size in Picasa. All photos courtesy of my exhausted and freezing but still beautiful wife.
