Natural History

On my last evening at the beach last week, I went out to the pond to feed the turtles and a big Asian carp that essentially made a living out of begging food from people.

As I tossed out the first pieces of bread, I heard a quacking sound from the other side of the pond.

And then I saw six brownish forms motoring across the pond in my direction.

I recognized that I was about to enjoy the company of a few mallard ducks.

I have always been a bit of a duck lover. I had a pet Muscovy hen named Chester, who was so named under the assumption that she was a male. When she laid an egg, she remained Chester. I just couldn’t come up with something else.

I also have a soft place for wood ducks. Every spring, a pair of these ducks check out our pond. With all of those trees growing around it, the pond appears to be an ideal place for these tree nesting ducks. It’s only when they discover that there are no hollow trees in which to make a nest that they move on to more suitable lodgings.  I have often wonder what would happen if we put a nest box in one of the trees. Maybe they would stay. Maybe.

But my mind was not on those birds this evening. My mind had been on turtles, gulls, and scallop shells. It was only from that quacking that my mind began to consider ducks.

My mallard company continued to advance in my direction. I could tell that this was a mother mallard and her five nearly grown offspring. Her orangish bill announced her adult status, as did her quacking and her position in the rear of the swimming phalanx. Her five nearly grown ducklings still peeps as if they were still little down-covered things.

As I tossed the bread into the water for the ducks, it became clear that feeding in the water was not what they had in mind.  They ignored the pieces of bread in the water and kept advancing. As soon as they reached the bank where I was standing, they leaped out and surrounded me.

I dropped a few crumbs for them. Some of these fell at my feet. The ducks ran around at the edges of my toes and gobbled down the bread.

Then, for some inexplicable reason, I knelt down. Perhaps I was just moved at the boldness of these wild ducks. Perhaps I had some primal urge to want to commune with them. I don’t know.

But I got on the ducks’ level. I was looking into their soft brown eyes.

And they were looking into mind.

I made sure that I tossed a little bread to the hen, who stood a few feet behind her charges. She was covering their backs.

Two of the ducklings were quite bold, and it did not bother them in the least to take food from my hand. They seemed to enjoy this behavior.  It may have given them an advantage over their siblings, who were busy squabbling over tossed aside crumbs. From my hand, they were guaranteed a big piece and no competition. They just had to be bold enough to take the bread from my hand.

Twice the bold ducklings’ bills missed the bread and grazed my fingers. I could feel the serrated plates on the inside of their bills gently scrape my hand. I first felt this sensation when I was a young boy at West Virginia state park. I remember being so scared by it that I know that I cried when ” the duck bit me.”

Yet when I felt this sensation from these ducklings, I felt connected. The duckling and I were one for a brief second. I could feel its sensations. I could fully appreciate its essence.

It brought out something instinctive in me that I can’t quite comprehend or fully articulate. It is this deep desire to connect with other living things that suddenly was awakened.

I’m sure that this desire is deep within all of us. That is why we want to feed wild animals. Even if we know that feeding many wild animals makes them more dangerous than the would be otherwise, we still want to. We want to feed the raccoons, the opossums, the skunks, the bears, the deer, and the alligators.

Such a desire probably made us better hunters and trappers, so one can see that it has some evolutionary advantages. Being able to catch small, cute animals also probably helped men win favor with women. Later on, anyone would could domesticate animals would have certain advantages in maintaining as constant source of protein.

But beyond that, I think we just like to connect with non-human beings. We have to put on so many different shells when we deal with others of our species. With animals, we can allow ourselves to be more open.

That’s the main purpose of dogs and cats and other companion animals. They allow us to be ourselves with another being that has a pulse but no ability to make harsh judgments about who we are.

The cheeky ducklings took me back.  No, they didn’t necessarily take me back to my somewhat duck-crazed childhood. They took me into a deeper past.

A past we all share as Homo sapiens, whoever we are or where ever we live. It is the same past we share with domestic dogs. It is the past that existed when we lived as part of the ecosystem and not above it.

It is a past that we will never regain.

But for a few seconds, we can catch glimpses of it. The vestiges that come through when we walk in the woods with our dogs or when we feel the bill plates of a duck gently scraping our skin.

And the trick is learning how to appreciate the glimpses, however brief they may be.