Heritage Pond – Page 2

An empty plastic bag dangled from his hand, the last moistened morsel fell to the ground and was readily consumed by a long yellow bill. Their appetites remained insatiable. Each quack seemed to say ‘Feed us more. Quack, more. Quack more!’

Mimic hurried back into the car, his shoes met the floor mat with a muddying squish. Snowfeather followed soon after and quickly closed the door. “My hands are freezing,” she said.

“Would you like to borrow my gloves?” replied Hawkeye.

My camera, untrained upon the waddling beasts outside, clicked once more. The captured image displayed briefly. “I’m having trouble focusing.”

“Too may ducks? Too much commotion?” Mimic asked.

“No, I just don’t know how to use this camera. It takes a long time to focus. I think I’m going to have to do this manually.” I flipped a switch on the side the lens and quickly refocused on a brown and white bird. “What kind of duck is that?”

“That’s a mallard.”

“The one right there? I thought mallards had a bright green head.”

“They do.” Mimic spotted the same duck. “It’s a pekin.”

“It’s peeking at what?”

“Not peeking,” Mimic continued matter-of-factly. “It’s a pekin duck.”

“Peking Duck? I thought that was a Chinese dish?”

Mimic could take no more mindless chatter and at last spoke plainly. “A pekin is a breed of mallard.”

“The white ones are called pekins,” Snowfeather said softly.

“What are the ones with the green head called?”

“Mallards.”

I sensed this was going to take a little more dissection of terms, perhaps some etymology was in order. I decided to begin again, this time with a simple, single question. And this time I addressed Hawkeye, the word expert. “What’s a mallard?”

“Nothing,“ she said smiling. “What’s a matter with you?”

A cold drizzle fell as we walked out of the restaurant. The weather wasn’t getting any better. The air bit a bit more bitterly. We huddled into the car, turned on the windshield wipers and turned up the heat. Hawkeye put the car in reverse. Would we go home and call it quits? Was it too cold to continue?

“Let’s go birding!”

Mimic’s words inspired us to press on despite the inclemency. The car was put in drive and our birding adventure shifted into high gear. We were headed for the nearby neighborhood duck pond. Ducks have no problem with rain and apparently the cold doesn’t faze them much either. “It’s like water off a ducks back.” Mimic said.

“Well it’s still too cold for me. Beaker, darling, you can take our little ducklings out for a stroll around the pond. I’ll wait here in the nice warm car.”

“I’d love to my dearest Hawkeye, but there’s no way I’m taking this camera out in that wet mess. We can keep an eye on them from here and I can get the pictures through the window.”

Young as they are, Mimic and Snowfeather ventured into the miserableness – braving the cold us ‘old people’ feared or were too sensible to endure – to feed our fine feathered friends the stale bread we had saved in our freezer.

“Look! They’re attacking him.” The ducks swarmed to Mimic at the first sign of the half thawed old squishy stuff. They were relentless and looked starved. “Quick, get a picture!”

“Okay, but I really don’t want pictures of birds behaving badly. Where are their manners? You always see ducks walk in straight lines all nice and neat. But these birds are on a feeding frenzy! – What kind of ducks are these anyway?”

The family’s ‘bird knowledge base’ follows this hierarchy: Mimic is our ‘go to guy’ whenever anything aviary is needed to be known. Snowfeather follows secondly as Mimics understudy of sorts, ready to fill in at a moment’s notice. Hawkeye is third and can identify most common birds with ease. I follow lastly, recognizing only a few birds here and there. I’m better with faces than with names.

These ducks looked familiar, I’d seen them before. Hawkeye provided the help. “Those ugly ones with the red thing on their heads, those are Muscovy.” Conversations lose some birding merit when the experts are out. The facts may not be so factual, but we get by.

“Oh, yeah. Those are the ducks that peck and chase little children at duck ponds all over the world. Hurry, roll down the window. Let’s get a picture!”