Five ago, my son ordered six ducklings from a catalog with hopes of starting a flock for eggs and meat. Ducks are well suited to our wet climate; and, with their webbed feet, are kinder on the garden than chickens.
They’re also really cute.
And they make delicious tacos.
Imagine a duck in a chef’s hat cooking tacos if you’d rather not think about how a duck becomes a taco.
Sadly, two of those first six ducklings died right away. We’ve learned a lot about raising ducklings since then. A predator killed two more. That was quite a surprise, finding a juvenile great horned owl perched inside the duckling’s enclosure one morning! The two that remained were both males.
Beloved males.
Not tacos.
There would be neither eggs nor meat from these fellows. One grew up to be a 4-H show duck. The other, his faithful companion.
In the years since, we have raised hundreds of meat ducks. Never, though, have we had a flock of laying ducks.
Until this spring. One day back in January there were duck eggs in the duck house for the first time ever. There was much rejoicing.
Last year, my now teenaged son wanted to try for layers again. He got eight ducklings last winter, just before the pandemic began.
He still seemed like a boy to me then, when the pandemic began. Covid has been a rite of passage. He’s a different person today, more than a year later.
The ducklings last spring were a bright spot during a dark time.
Seven made it past babyhood, all feathered out.
A fox got two over the summer.
My son got the fox.
Then there were five.
One last feather comes in as a duck matures, “the drake feather”, a little curly feather on the tail. Only males (drakes) get them. They all got them. They were all males. That was not going to make for a very productive laying flock. Tacos it was.
That summer, however, we found a neighbor who was selling three female ducks of the same age. Five males and three females though, that wasn’t going to work out well...
Ducks are persistent suitors. So persistent that some breeds have evolved elaborate reproductive systems where the males have penises that are a quarter of the length of their bodies and the females can choose whether to accept him or to squeeze him off and route him into a corkscrewed, dead-end pocket where he’ll think he’s mated with her but he actually hasn’t. I’m totally serious. A good ratio is one male to every 4-6 females. Any more than that and the males will fight with each other over the females, and then tear the females up. All to say, five drakes and three females would not end happily.
He had to chose which drakes to keep and which to send to the freezer (down pillows forthcoming). He decided to keep two drakes, a dapper black and green Cayuga and a cartoonish White Crested. The amended ratio was still not ideal, but they were young so I agreed to give them some time to see if they could get along before deciding if another drake had to go.
Only it wasn’t two males and three females. Within a few weeks, it was clear that he had four males and one female! I rearranged the freezer to make room.
He still wanted to keep two drakes, and with then keeping the one new female, we urgently needed to find more females to balance the sex ratio.
Over the winter, another neighbor replied to my online plea for ducks with much excitement. She said she had 12 young ducks that needed to go ASAP, and that if he could catch them, he could have them for free. She wasn’t sure how many of each sex she had, but the price was right. I didn’t bother to ask what breed they were. Didn’t matter. He just needed some ladies for these not-so-gentle-men.
It was a rainy morning when we went over to the neighbor’s, boots on, with a couple of poultry crates and a tarp in the back of my rig. Turns out our kids all knew each other from school...back when there was school. Nobody had seen anybody in forever because of the pandemic, and it was the most joyful thing to safely socialize outside, herding a dozen ducks.
Now if you’ve ever herded ducks...
Sheep dogs train with ducks. They move like a school of fish, all together. It’s delightful to watch, and can make moving them from pen to pen or back into their house at night very easy. It can also be complete pandemonium when it’s December in Oregon and the ground is a sponge and there are four kids coordinating the effort with no fences!
But one by one, the kids bagged ‘em. Six females! Plus six more males for the freezer. I could see the delight in my son’s eyes: these were Buff ducks, the very breed his third-grade heart had longed for years ago, their page dog-eared in the catalog that he read with such intensity that winter that the cover fell off and the center pages had to be gently tucked inside before bed.
Now he’s a teenager as tall as I am, passionate about many interesting things, including raising heritage breed ducks. When he was tiny, I used to sit him on my lap, like I do now with his baby brother, and tickle his rolls and remind him in a silly voice that he would still be my baby even when he was a big hairy man.
That seemed so funny 14 years ago.
I tear up a little remembering that today, looking at him almost fully feathered. He still holds baby ducks with the same tenderness with which I held him in my arms, but he’s no baby duck anymore.
Why did our neighbor have a dozen ducks to give away? That’s a story that’s 100% country. Some time ago the neighbor’s daughter’s boyfriend asked her (the neighbor) if he could invite her (the daughter) to prom with a sign that said “I’d be a lucky duck if you’d go to prom with me!” As if that weren’t cute enough, he would present her with two fuzzy little ducklings along with the sign. Mom said yes, he could give her a pair of ducklings. Daughter said yes, she’d go to prom with him.
How cute is that?!? Super cute.
Then, as they do, those ducklings grew up and raised some babies of their own on the pond, and those babies had to go.
My son is still a few years away from going to prom, if there even is such a thing as prom in a few years. Adolescence in the time of Covid is not something I ever imagined navigating as a parent. I’m not sure if these adolescents realize how extra it is to go through puberty and a pandemic at the same time. Sometimes I try to tease out what’s behind the moods, is it the age or is it The Age of Covid?
Then I remember it doesn’t matter. What matters is those childhood dreams that we somehow thread through into our adulthood. That requires leaving enough space in the day to be the eye of the needle.
That I spent drizzly afternoons playing house in the woods when I was a child, taking shelter under a willow tree, grinding madrone bark into “tea”, would not surprise anyone who knows me today.
What passions captured your heart as a child? What did you doodle in your notebooks? When you had the time and freedom to fantasize about anything you wanted, what did you want? Or if you didn’t have a childhood that allowed for that sort of imagining then, what do you imagine now? I’ve heard it said too that one of the best ways to establish an exercise habit as an adult is to go back to whatever physical activities a person enjoyed as a child: Scaled all the trees? Try rock climbing. Rode bikes until the sun went down? Get a helmet and start peddling again. What did your body enjoy when it was young?
I hope you find space in your day for some of that.
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