42


COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • MARCH 2020


Duck antics provide late winter amusement There’s no play like fowl play to lighten the tone


We are going to slaughter some ducks on Thursday. I must not shy away from keeping the farm story real, but I probably shouldn’t be writing about it publicly. No further details


Farm Story by ANNA HELMER


than to say that having to kill, pluck and gut farm animals makes me understand the appeal of store- bought meat (neatly arranged on styro and sensibly wrapped in plastic). Commence duck tale. We are not a commercial duck operation, just to be clear. We have one Muscovy male and three Muscovy females, plus an apparently non- binary Indian Runner. Ducklings ensue. Thursday’s doomed set tripped out of the back corner of the duck house quite late in the fall and have thrived.


I can never get over how darn cute


ducklings are: little yellow and grey puffballs with teensy orange beaks and an absurd habit of standing on one leg, stretching out their tiny wings and tipping over. The parenting group – first mother, second mother, auntie (the females alternate these roles, regardless of who hatched what), male duck (slightly vexed by


the whole affair, somewhat distant), and Indian Runner (utterly clueless but willing), works well and we end up with edible ducks. Mom does much to thwart the opportunistic ravens by hovering nearby herself and constantly adjusting fences, gates, netting, water and feed. The cute stage too quickly


gives way to an off-putting adolescence. The yellow fluff dulls to matted brown, straggly feathers begin to emerge, and


they really start to poop. In a few short weeks, they are full-grown and waddling around pooping, engaging in public sex and squabbling. Have you seen a duck fight? They bash, or rather weakly fling their necks against one another, breath heavily, tug on one another’s feathers and poop. When everyone has had enough, they all flap their wings and run off in all directions to poop somewhere else. It is very likely no duck has ever been injured by another duck in a duck fight since the beginning of time.


There must be something good My mom loves ducks, claiming they


are far more interesting than chickens. I don’t consider this a good reason to keep ducks. However, I sort of-kind of get their appeal. They have been part of farmyards for ages, and across cultures, so there must be something good or even important about ducks.


Perhaps they eat a lot of bugs? Can they be trained to eat weeds? Their eggs are certainly coveted for baking and their fat for roasting potatoes. Or maybe it’s that they provide good entertainment, a lack of which may well be the cause of malaise on many a modern farm. The fellow who started


biodynamics (that method of farming that is “beyond organic”) did so in part because he felt that the old ways of farming were pretty much lost and he hoped to inspire a suitable replacement. He had attempted to compile a compendium of traditional farm lore but gave it up, realizing that most of it was forgotten: the use of technology and chemicals in farming had erased the need for that kind of wisdom. That was 100 years ago. Imagine what is lost now. Maybe all we have left are the


ducks. Just duckie. Duck soup. Sitting


duck. Lame duck. Like water off a duck’s back. Get your ducks in a row. Ruffled feathers. As a duck takes to water. Odd duck. Lucky duck. Dead duck.


There’s a lot of farm idiom cemented into the language, and a good lot of it emanates from this one rather unassuming corner of the farmyard. It means people have found ducks particularly worthy of observation for a very long


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