Avoiding pet stores wasn’t enough to keep our animal population from expanding. Neither was snipping the phone line to block requests that we take in yet another winged or long-eared orphan. Occasionally a new animal would literally drop from the sky.
One summer afternoon, Stanley Sue sounded the shrill alarm-call whistle that usually indicated she had spotted a hawk from the dining room window. I peered into the yard and up through the skylight, but didn’t see anything more threatening than a nuthatch, until a tan-and-white pigeon plopped down from our hackberry tree onto the flat roof of the milk house. While pigeons are as common as in-laws in most neighborhoods, they never visited us in the country. A few shy mourning doves pecked the ground under our bird feeders in frigid seasons when natural food was scarce, but we were definitely far removed from pigeon thoroughfares. In an attempt to satiate every bird within a two-mile radius of our house, we usually supplemented the food in our bird feeders by dumping vast quantities of seed on the ground and on the milk-house roof. Ground-feeding birds such as blue jays, along with finch flocks, attacked the scattered seed with gusto, but with nothing resembling the desperate greed exhibited by the tan-and-white pigeon. Once the bird had eaten its fill, it stayed put even as I grimaced at it though different windows and from different angles, attempting to assess if anything was wrong.
“I think it might be someone’s pet,” Linda concluded. “Maybe it’s a racing pigeon that got knocked off course by a hawk.”
I pooh-poohed the idea even as I considered the possibility that it might be true. Wherever the pigeon had come from, it didn’t demonstrate overt fear of humans—or at least not of me, failing to budge from the roof even after I had unfolded the stepladder next to the shed, clomped quavering to the top, and sat upon the eaves not three feet away from the presumed stray. Reaching out to tweak its beak proved a step too far. The bird flew to the metal strut on the second story of our house that buttressed the chimney of our basement wood furnace. Once I returned to ground level, the pigeon’s love affair with the milk-house roof resumed.
“I think that bird might be someone’s pet,” I explained to Linda patiently.
“She looks like a Tillie,” Linda surmised.
Deciding that the pigeon sought our help, I sent her flapping back to the chimney support by lugging our trusty Humane Live Animal Trap to the top of the milk house and loading it with a virgin pile of scratch feed sweetened with a pinch of the parakeet seed that Howard loved. I watched with Stanley Sue through the dining room window as Tillie dropped down to the roof, paced in front of the open door of the trap bobbing her head with each step, and after a moment of indecision, hopped inside. I worried that she didn’t weigh enough to trip the trigger, but a few seconds later she fluttered her wings in panic as the door snapped shut behind her.
Tillie showed more annoyance than unease as Linda transferred her from the raccoon trap to a cage on the front porch. Less than a month earlier, Liza had abandoned her straw-filled pool to rejoin the backyard ducks, and it seemed natural to once again have a living creature outside the living room to keep the mice and spiders company. Uncertain what sorts of exotic microscopic creatures might be clinging to an apparent bird in distress, I took her to see Dr. Fuller after a few days.
“She does have lice,” he told me, as he began examining her.
“She’s a Birmingham Roller Pigeon,” I blurted out in her defense.
“Son of a gun,” he chuckled politely. My dubious identification was based on three minutes spent with a guide to doves and pigeons at a local remaindered-book outlet. I had wanted to buy the half-priced reference book, but was easily dissuaded by an expansive “Disease and Injury” appendix brimming with color photographs of bizarre growths, pustules, and swollen internal organs.
“She certainly doesn’t look like any wild pigeon I’ve ever seen,” I insisted.
“I don’t know,” he answered gently. “I’ve seen lots of color variation, including all-white birds. But they usually don’t last long in a flock. They stick out like a sore thumb to predators.”
Except for the bloom of lice scheming beneath her feathers, Tillie received a clean bill of health from our vet. Back home on the porch, I was shaking a can of bird insecticide from the pet store until my arm hurt when Linda came out to determine what the moaning was all about.
“Too much exercise,” I complained.
“What are you going to do with that?” she asked.
“Delouse Tillie.”
“Put her somewhere else while you spray her cage.”
“You’re supposed to spray the bird. That’s the whole point.”
“See the label? See the picture of the happy bird on the label? ‘Safe for birds.’ You have to spray the bird to kill the lice. Dr. Fuller recommended this brand.”
“It’s still insecticide,” Linda pointed out. “It will make her sick.”
“‘Safe for birds,’” I repeated. “I’ll spray the cage. But I have to spray her, too.”
“Don’t spray her with insecticide. You’ll make her sick.”
“You’re supposed to spray the bird.”
We went around and around like that until both of us were giddy. Releasing the bird from the cage to flutter around on the porch, I took the cage outside and liberally doused it with the spray. Linda watched, then went back to her business in the house. I chased down the bird, put the bird back inside the cage, and lightly sprayed the bird with insecticide. More of the insecticide dribbled onto my fingers than ended up on either cage or caged bird. I licked my fingers with no ill effects other than a sudden hankering for an arachnid canapé.
The longer we kept Tillie, the stronger she became. She also grew less satisfied with captivity and increasingly intolerant of her captors. For a few days we tried putting her in the dining room with the other birds, thinking that once she had gotten a taste of the pampered life, she would reclaim her identity as a pet bird. The only joy she eked out of perching on a cage top near the ceiling was launching pecks at Howard whenever he landed near her. In the larger free-flight area of the porch, she spent the majority of her time fluttering from window to window in search of a way outdoors. Gradually, we came around to realizing that Tillie was undoubtedly a wild bird after all. Dinner at my sister Joan’s house clinched it when Linda and I studied the sky-darkening flock of pigeons that had descended on her lawn around her bird feeder. Sprinkled amid the standard-issue blue-grey city pigeon uniforms were pigeons clad in brown, white, and green color mixes.
THREE WEEKS HAD elapsed between Tillie’s capture and the afternoon I took her cage outside and opened the door. “You can leave if you want to,” I told her, hinting that it would be ungrateful to actually fly away. With an energetic chugging of her wings, she rose as high as the second story chimney strut and stayed there. Throughout the remainder of the summer, she stayed close to the yard. She might disappear for hours at a time, but by evening we would always find her roosting on the chimney support as close to the house as possible, for protection against hawks. Sometimes when Linda and I were taking care of the ducks and we left a hose running on the lawn between pens, Tillie would swoop down, grab a drink, then return to the safety of the milk-house roof or our hackberry tree.
A few days after Tillie’s release, Linda ran into Tam and Steve at the Food City supermarket. The couple shared a house even smaller than ours with eight orphaned cats and owned a patch of land overrun at various times with wild turkeys (we had watched a flock from Tam and Steve’s living room window), deer, Canada geese, and raccoons. An industrious muskrat usually busied itself in the pond on the other side of their gravel driveway, while a fat possum they dubbed Electrolux had taken possession of a back corner of their garage.
“A friend of ours has a really nice rabbit in need of a good home,” Tam told Linda. “She’s getting married and moving away, and she can’t bring the rabbit with her.”
“Bob won’t let us have any more rabbits,” Linda said.
“The poor guy sits out in a cage in the barn all by himself.”
Faster than the eye could register it, Linda wrote down the telephone number of the rabbit owner. As if swept in on a tide of history, I found myself the following Saturday walking into a barn owned by Tam and Steve’s neighbor, Judy. I had spent the morning rehearsing any number of excuses in my mind why we couldn’t possibly take a third male rabbit, but I found myself laughing out loud when I laid eyes on Walter. As soon as he saw us, he hopped into the battered cardboard box that Judy told us was his favorite spot to hide. Hiding didn’t equal concealment, however. He couldn’t quite squeeze his entire body into the shadow of the carton. Compared to Bertie and Rollo, Walter was huge, a Checker Giant mix, tipping the scales at just over eight pounds. Despite the epic proportions of his rump and haunches, his head appeared comically oversize, and his jet-black eyes topped with an exuberant thatch of eyelashes added an irresistible element of pathos.
“He’s beautiful,” Linda beamed.
Beautiful and silly. After a minute or two, Walter determined that we didn’t represent enough of a threat to discourage him from abandoning his shelter for the feed dish. This gave me the opportunity to step back and attempt to take in his whimsical magnificence. It was as if a careless breeder had spilled a can of grey paint on the back and head of a pure white rabbit, and the paint had fanned out in symmetrical patterns on his right and left sides like ink on blotting paper. Before deciding to take him home, we tested to see if he would allow us to hold him without squirming and kicking. He failed, but the test was moot. No person of sound mind would pick up and cuddle an eight-pound rabbit, and neither would we. When Linda set him down on top of his large wood-and-wire cage and started petting him, however, he immediately hunkered down in anticipation of a prolonged spate of pleasure. That earned him a passing grade.
Received wisdom in rabbit circles speaks of bonding that can occur between rabbits of vastly different sizes. While bunny brothers Bertie and Rollo fought voraciously on the few occasions that they shared a room without benefit of a wire grid between them, we held faint hopes that Walter and Bertie or Walter and Rollo might buddy up and simplify our lives. As it turned out, Walter showed no trace of aggression toward Bertie. He liked Bertie. No, he loved him. Eagerly and incessantly, he tried mating with the rabbit that was a mere one-third his size. Bertie was invisible beneath Walter’s bulk, and we marveled that he hadn’t suffocated before we could reach them amid the tangle of dining-room table and chair legs.
Burdened with three rabbits that required constant separation, I created a triad of fencing loops in the basement anchored to a central pillar. Outdoors, I subdivided one of the rabbit runs, leaving the largest of the three for our Checker Giant. On temperate days, the boys enjoyed a romp in the fresh air during the afternoon and a romp in the moldy basement air after dinner. Then Walter was free to explore the kitchen while Bertie gnawed up the living room and placid Rollo sat upon my lap for an hour of television (his choice of program). Next, we would catch Bertie and return him to his cage in the dining room, allowing Rollo his turn desecrating the living room furnishings. After twenty minutes or so, we retired Rollo to his cage for the night and removed the board between the dining room and living room so that Walter could blunder in and rub his chin on every object in view, scent-marking them until the next day when the entire wearying process would begin all over again.
As if simple logistics didn’t keep us busy enough with the rabbits, we discovered that Bertie suffered from a malocclusion, a condition in which the teeth do not meet properly but overlap in bucktooth or underbite fashion. Though dental defects are cute as can be on waifish supermodels, they’re potentially lethal to a rabbit, whose teeth grow more than a quarter-inch a week. Unchecked, Bertie’s upper incisors would curl in on themselves like a party blower, while his lower incisors would ultimately pierce the roof of his closed mouth, though he’d be unable to eat long before that occurred. An unhelpful book I found on dwarf-rabbit varieties, written by a German expert, recommended euthanizing any bunnies with tooth problems, but this struck me as counterproductive. Instead, Linda would haul Bertie into the bathroom about once a week, wrap him in a towel, and pry open his mouth while I clipped his teeth.
Initially I used a tool designed for trimming dog toenails, abandoned it for human toenail clippers that didn’t fit the contours of rabbit dental anatomy much better, then, upon advice from Dr. Fuller, settled on the smallest pair of wire cutters I could find. The trick was to quickly truncate the teeth in two or three clips before Bertie decided to clamp his mouth shut. If I took off too little of the tooth at the wrong angle, I ended up sculpting knife-point fangs and creating an attack rabbit. If I took off too much at a single clip, I risked the stomach-turning consequence of splintering his teeth down to the gumline. Apart from causing eating difficulties, splintering an upper incisor could also inflame the rabbit’s tear duct and even lead to pasteurella, a potentially lethal bacterial infection. When done correctly, the amputation apparently hurt Bertie less than it did me. Rabbits’ teeth lack the nerve endings that ours have and more closely resemble thick versions of our fingernails, but the procedure never failed to set my own teeth on edge.
Meanwhile, backyard lodging became a few feathers less crowded when I unexpectedly found a home for our pugnacious greenheads. For weeks at a time, the Khaki Campbell–mallard hybrids shared the same pool with their Khaki Campbell father and uncle without a single incident of domestic abuse. But proximity to the females in the adjacent pen would suddenly send duck testosterone levels soaring, forcing us to confine the youngsters to the inevitable wire loop in order to give Stewart and Trevor respite from pecks, bites, and wing-flapping. I carped about the situation on an Internet poultry newsgroup, for some reason populated mainly by English farmers. Average Americans were probably too busy trimming rabbit teeth to spend much time on-line. Richard and Jeri Pellston not only sympathized with our excess-duck problem, but also offered to take the greenheads off our hands. Remarkably, they lived in Michigan. Though their home was near the tip of the “thumb” region, clear across the Michigan “palm” from us, Richard’s job as a database consultant occasionally took him to, of all places, Lowell.
“We got a couple hens. Two Barred Rocks and a Rhode Island Red,” Richard told me in an e-mail that made me wonder how much the ability to count figured into his government job. With heartbreaking innocence he added, “We want to try some ducks.”
After promising to build a raccoon-proof pen complete with a non–Ninja Turtle plastic swimming pool, he and Jeri showed up on a late July afternoon when the weeds in our yard were at the peak of ripeness. I thought of them as weeds, but Richard begged to differ. Shortly after stepping out of a shock absorber–challenged station wagon that cleared the ground by as much as a few millimeters, he immediately started stabbing greenery with his cane. “That’s lamb’s-quarter,” he pointed out. “You can cook it or shred it in a salad.” Jeri nodded in agreement. “That’s pokeweed over there.”
“I love the purple berries it gets in the fall,” Linda told them.
“I like to eat it. You ever heard of poke salad?”
“I’ve heard the song ‘Poke Salad Annie,’” I offered, though Richard was fifteen years too young to recall the song.
“They eat it down South,” said Linda.
“I eat it,” he repeated, as he hobbled across the yard two steps ahead of us. His sparse brush of a chin beard and truculent tone, which I interpreted as shyness, suggested he could spend an afternoon grazing an overgrown meadow in goaty bliss. “I bet you’ve got all kinds of edibles out here,” he marveled.
“You are keeping the ducks as pets?” Linda ventured.
Richard turned his head in surprise.
“You’re not planning on eating them?” I clarified.
“We might breed them,” Jeri answered, “But we would never kill a duck. We don’t eat our chickens, either.”
“We eat chicken,” Richard explained with a burst of gusto. “We just don’t eat our chickens.”
With his battered military jacket and wide-wale corduroy pants with whole sections of cord worn away, Richard didn’t strike me as particularly fastidious. But his first comment about the greenheads voiced an aesthetic concern. “What’s the mark on that one’s beak? It looks like his beak’s peeling.” Sure enough, if you studied the duck with microscopic intensity, a fleck at the edge of his upper bill disclosed a darker shade of olive than the rest of his beak.
I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. The Khaki Campbells get that, too.” Either Stewart or Trevor—we had no idea which twin duck was which—betrayed a similar nearly imperceptible cosmetic flaw. “There’s a thin layer of tissue that coats their beaks, and sometimes it gets worn away,” I bluffed.
“So it will grow back,” he frowned.
I shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. It’s never gotten any worse.”
Satisfied that the greenheads had a reasonable shot at attaining perfection, he agreed to take the pair, though Linda insisted on further assurances that the ducks would be housed properly, kept as pets, and spared a seasoning with savory herbs. Richard leaned thoughtfully on his cane and supervised while Linda and I packed the greenheads into a cardboard box and loosely sealed it with the obligatory duct tape. Jeri opened the tailgate of their cluttered station wagon and managed to clear a few square feet of space by rearranging a dozen or so heavy cartons containing dot-matrix computer printouts presumably brimming with confidential government data. Just as the couple was about to drive off, Richard smiled at us for the first time. “Maybe we’ll stop by again next time we’re in town,” he told us. “Maybe we could have a cookout.”
The pair did prove good on their word to take good care of the greenheads. Within a week, Richard e-mailed me a photo of the ducks frolicking in a floral-print wading pool inside a high-walled chicken-wire pen.
TILLIE THE PIGEON had witnessed the greenheads’ exit from her perch on the chimney strut. She seemed fully dependent upon the scratch feed we tossed onto the roof of the milk house each day, and as summer gave way to a chilly, windy fall, we wondered how she would cope with the coming snow. Hiding in a pile of scrap lumber in the barn was a crudely made wooden box that looked as if it had a full year of life still ahead of it. One of the small children of the former owners of our house had apparently cobbled it together with a native carpentry skill that I could admire but never duplicate. Taking exceptional care not to stress the workmanship, I looped a rope through a handy knothole in the most reliably solid slat and slowly hoisted the box to the gently sloping roof above our dining room, positioning it just under Tillie’s favorite roosting spot.
“I hope she’s smart enough to use it once the weather gets cold,” I told Linda. Our visiting pigeon turned out to be even smarter. When the first blustery day arrived, Tillie was nowhere to be found. Judging that a good thing had reached its logical end, she apparently flew off to petition for readmittance to her flock.
Not all departures from our bird community were happy. One fall afternoon, Linda called me out to the barn to try and help one of our turkeys that was thrashing in pain on the concrete floor. By the time we got back to her, she was already dead. “Some animal chewed up her wing,” Linda said, and we also discovered wounds on the bird’s right side. There was no indication an animal had climbed over or burrowed under the five-foot-high fence, and the other three turkeys appeared as unruffled as ever. We couldn’t figure out what had happened, unless a hawk had been bold enough to swoop into the enclosure. But a raptor was usually far too wary to enter the relative confinement of an outdoor pen except under circumstances of extreme hunger, and in that case a hawk wouldn’t waste its time on prey too large to carry away.
Puzzling over the unexpected death of our turkey kept us occupied off and on as a snowy fall blew into a frigid winter. We certainly had sufficient time to mull the mystery over, since we were no longer visiting pet shops, answering the phone, shopping for food, or glancing out our windows for fear that another addition to the circus would land at our feet. But I couldn’t avoid my job; in early January I received an e-mail at the office from my sister Joan, which set a flurry of events in motion.
“MY GIRLFRIEND B.J. IS SEEING A BIG WHITE DUCK AT RICHMOND PARK SWIMMING IN A LITTLE CIRCLE OF WATER THAT HASN’T FROZEN YET,” Joan wrote me before her discovery of the caps lock key. “B.J. DOESN’T THINK THE DUCK CAN FLY. HER NEIGHBORS NEAR THE PARK ARE WORRIED THE DUCK DOESN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO EAT.”
Little comprehending the force I was about to unleash, I casually mentioned the e-mail to Linda over dinner. “From Joan’s description, it sounds like a White Pekin, and she said a Canada goose that also doesn’t seem to be able to fly is keeping it company.”
“It’s going to get really cold this week,” said Linda, with alarm in her voice. Her fork hung in midair between her plate and mouth. “What’s B.J.’s phone number?”
“How should I know? I’ve never even laid eyes on her. Anyway,” I added irritably, “I don’t trust people who go by initials.”
“That’s not true. How about M.C.? My mom’s friend named M.C. is an awfully nice lady.”
“Then call M.C. and ask her for B.J.’s number,” I suggested. I didn’t like where this was going, and I didn’t like where I knew I was going. Two hours later, after we had put the animals to bed, warmed the car up to hockey-rink specs, and driven twenty miles to Richmond Park on the west side of Grand Rapids, I stood shivering in eight-degree air with a wind chill of minus twenty under a bank of floodlights that crisply illuminated each flake of blowing snow, making me even colder. The few diehards still in the park were surrendering to the darkness and the steadily falling temperature. Parents and smiling children with glowing, wind-burned faces towed toboggans behind them as they trudged toward the parking lot. A mother and a tiny girl paused to watch Linda as she paced the edge of the frozen pond searching for a way to reach the duck and goose that swam unconcerned a few dogsled lengths away. The weather didn’t bother them a bit.
“Do you think I can walk out on the ice?” Linda asked.
“God, no!” I told her. “Not if there’s still a thawed spot in the middle.”
“I threw a branch out on the ice and it didn’t crack.”
“I think you weigh a little more than a branch,” I said, surprised my ears hadn’t cracked and tinkled to the ground.
“I wish I had a net,” Linda lamented. “If I had a wide enough net, and a person on each side of the pond held one end, and a third person shooed them out of the water, we could probably catch them.” Her eyes darted up the slope of the sledding hill and down again to the parking lot as if someone in his haste might have accidentally dropped precisely the net we needed in the snow. “How about if I crawl out on the ice on my stomach?”
“I wouldn’t do that, either.”
“I’ll just crawl out a little ways.”
“Let me remind you that I can’t swim, and I especially can’t swim in really cold water.” I hugged myself tighter, even considering the possibility of my shivering flesh coming in contact with anything wet. “If you start to drown, you’re on your own.”
“Hold on to my ankles, then,” she told me, as she got down on her knees and leaned twin purple mittens upon the ice. Startled by her intrusion or simply rattled by the inexplicable sight of a well-bundled hominid on all fours, the white duck and the Canada goose fled with flapping wings to the far side of the frozen pond.
“They’ll be okay,” I told her, as we stood staring into the floodlit gloom of swirling snow. Eventually the duck and goose began sidling toward their water sanctuary, convinced that they must have experienced a winter hallucination. I was sorry for the birds, even though they didn’t seem particularly vulnerable at the moment. But Linda was probably right that once the pond completely iced over, without the ability to fly, they would be at the mercy of stray neighborhood children and boisterous dogs. We were peculiarly helpless to help them. Far from feeling defeated by the futility of the situation, I was beginning to experience a faint glow of happiness as I recalled the comfort of the beckoning living room couch. We retreated to the relative warmth of the car and slid on icy roads in the direction of home.
Linda didn’t give up on the Richmond Park duck. She had started calling him Richie. Through B.J. she learned the phone number of a woman named Lesley who lived near the pond and had tried to catch the duck. When she wasn’t plotting strategy with Lesley, Linda was conspiring with energetic animal-shelter employee Bruce, whom Lesley spoke to almost daily about the icebound duck and goose. Bruce had made two after-midnight attempts to sneak up on the birds, in addition to a number of daylight pursuits. During her own visits to the pond, Linda enlisted the aid of gamboling grade-school-age kids, who leapt at the chance to chase the waterfowl without incurring a frown or swat from an adult. But the birds always eluded capture.
Linda’s worries about Richie and his friend increased as temperatures plummeted. I devoted a tiny corner of my mind to the Richmond waterfowl, but our own ducks and geese were my immediate concern. One Saturday morning when I waddled out to the pen swaddled in sweaters and a ski parka, all of the birds except Hector trotted out into the snow. Although he hissed and snapped his beak, Hector was rooted to one spot, unable to walk away. Like our first Muscovy, Daphne, his feathers didn’t repel water as efficiently as the other ducks’, and after splashing himself from the bucket the previous evening and failing to shed the water, he had ended up frozen to the ground. Only a few feathers imprisoned him, and I managed to quickly free him with a couple of deft tugs. When Linda “defrosted” him with a hair dryer, she noticed an odd lump of flesh the diameter of her thumbnail protruding from the middle of his back. “We’d better have that looked at,” she said. “It’s some sort of growth that might need to be cut off.”
The news from Richmond Park turned dire. When Linda called Lesley for an update the following Monday, she learned that the pond was almost completely frozen over. A few adventuresome children had begun skating on the thickest ice around the edges, frightening the birds into retreating to the bushes until after dark, when they returned to their tiny dwindling patch of slushy surface water. “In a day or two,” Lesley said, “there won’t be any water left.” Linda barely slept that night. Around 4:00 A.M. I awoke to blearily notice light leaking through the crack of the closed bedroom door. I found Linda on the couch. “I’ve been up since two,” she told me. “I can’t stop thinking about that duck.”
After work the next day, I took my boots off on the porch rather than stomping off the snow on the mat in the living room and quietly set them on the floor. I opened the front door gently enough to avoid triggering the oversize jingle bells still tied to the door-knob and shut it with the same care. I expected my exhausted wife to be in the throes of a ferocious afternoon nap. Instead she whooshed in from the kitchen enveloped by a beatific glow. “Bruce just called!” she cried. “He caught Richie last night. The Canadian got away. It turned out he could fly.”
“He caught Richie?” I marveled. “How?”
“Bruce had a net of some kind,” she told me, though presumably not the two-person pond-wide variety. “He was able to get right out onto the ice and snuck up on them when they were sleeping. The Canadian flew away, but get this. When he took Richie to the animal shelter, it turned out that they already had a Canadian goose, so they put Richie in the same pen with the Canadian, and he feels right at home. It’s a miracle from the Lord!”
“What’ll happen to him?”
“They’ve got to decide at the animal shelter. We might get him, so keep your fingers crossed.”
RICHIE STAYED AT the shelter for just over a week while the staff veterinarian evaluated his health. After passing the treadmill test with flying colors and promising to watch his cholesterol levels, he was first unleashed on an area farmer who occasionally took in orphaned animals. But Richie turned out to be one duck too many for his flock once his penchant for fighting with other males emerged. We agreed to take him and try housing him with our females, figuring that a large White Pekin couldn’t mate with our smaller Khaki Campbell females any more successfully than Walter could sire another rabbit with Bertie. We did wonder whether a feral duck accustomed to the unfettered grandeur of Richmond Park pond would adapt well to drab captivity. His most recent interactions with humans had consisted of them chasing him with or without a net, and we worried that he might not tolerate us performing duck-pen chores at close quarters, especially when one of us could conceivably be singing “Camptown Races” as she worked.
Richie’s impressive gooselike stature and radiant white plumage immediately intimidated both our hens and drakes when we introduced him to the girls’ side of the pen. Stewart and Trevor muttered dire threats from the safety of the opposite side of the wire. The females danced away whenever the behemoth took an awkward step in their direction. The girls’ nervousness infected the geese, who maintained a respectful distance even though they stood a full head taller than the puzzled newcomer. As the day wore on and important matters such as quacking incessantly for ice-free swimming pool water supplanted lesser concerns, the girls came around to blandly regarding Richie as just another duck. For his part, Richie decided that while freedom had its place, bountiful females and plentiful food were what he really wanted in life.
With a dollop of trepidation, we released Richie and the girls into the forty-inch-high snow pack that covered our backyard while we changed their water and replenished their scratch feed. Instead of bolting for the perimeter fence at the sight of Linda dragging out a hose from the basement, Richie dutifully stayed close to the girls as they paddled through the powder and obediently followed them back into the enclosure when their exercise time and our tolerance for frigid wind blasts mutually expired. He meshed so easily with our other ducks, I wondered if he hadn’t been pining for a stable home environment during his seemingly carefree months at Richmond Park.
“What was he even doing there?”
“He can’t fly,” Linda said. “He couldn’t have gotten there himself, so somebody probably dumped him.”
That meant we were building a community of waterfowl misfits.
Our main misfit, Hector, accompanied Linda on a late-winter visit to Dr. Fuller, who delivered the bad news that the growth on the Muscovy’s back was an inoperable tumor rooted to his spine. I took the information in stride, figuring that any negative consequences loomed far off in the future. The previous winter, Dr. Fuller had x-rayed our friendly female parakeet, Rossy, and discovered a tumor tucked inside the recesses of an air sac that was responsible for her intermittent breathing difficulties. Sometimes in the evenings when she grew tired, her tail flicked with every breath and she wheezed loudly enough that we could hear her in the next room. Still, she remained active and happy for a full year. On her last day of life, she flew to my shoulder as usual during dinner, snuggled against my neck, and pecked at a scrap of bread, weak but apparently otherwise untroubled. If Rossy could survive for months carrying an insidious tumor deep inside a vital respiratory organ, then Hector’s external tumor didn’t strike me as immediately life threatening.
His freezing to the ground earlier in the winter had apparently been an omen, however. He began to stumble and move around more slowly. One spring morning shortly after the lavender crocuses had replaced the last patches of ice on the ground, the girls streamed out of their pen to nibble greedily at the damp backyard dirt. When Hector didn’t follow at his usual diffident distance, Linda discovered her favorite duck stranded inside the pen, unable to stand up. By tensing his wings and using them as crutches, he managed a degree of locomotion across the gravel floor but not enough to get him anywhere. The hot pride in his yellow eyes dared Linda to feel sorry for him, and he thrashed unhappily when she picked him up and carried him into the house. We commandeered Walter’s fenced-in enclosure in the basement, wrapped straw around a sheet for use as a bed, and kept Hector as comfortable as possible. He disliked being indoors and might have tolerated the porch with better humor, but Linda worried that it was too cold for him.
Linda’s friend LuAnne brought over a small laminated picture of St. Francis of Assisi with a prayer to the saint printed on the back—we called them “holy cards” when I attended Blessed Sacrament School—and hung it on a ribbon over the convalescent’s pen. “It’s been blessed by Father Andresiak,” she told Linda. “I brought a bottle of holy water, too.” While Linda held Hector in her lap, LuAnne looped a rosary around the duck’s neck, sprinkled him with the holy water, and prayed with my wife for his recovery. As always, Hector loved receiving attention from Linda, though I suspected that LuAnne’s Catholic rituals perplexed a duck whose disdain for water had always ruled out baptism.
Despite their prayers, Hector grew alarmingly weak over the next few days and finally stopped eating his scratch feed. I wrestled with the question of whether we should euthanize him, while Linda held firm to her belief that as long as he didn’t appear to be suffering, he should be allowed to live out his final hours. I knew she was right, because Linda made sure that Hector’s last impression was of her love for him. If any duck died happily, that Muscovy did. While I went to work as usual, Linda spent a large part of the morning with Hector. “I could tell by the look in his eye that he wasn’t going to make it through the day,” Linda told me later. She placed him outside so he could enjoy the sun. When he tried to flap his wings and acted agitated, she picked him up and he calmed right down. “I sat back down and held him for a while,” she told me. “He gave a shudder, and I knew that he was dying then.”
I was incredibly touched by Linda’s dedication to an animal that most other people would simply have ignored, if you could ignore a duck who was busy calculating the most auspicious angle for latching on to your leg with his beak. We were comforted by our friends, especially Linda’s friend Deanne and our pet-sitter Betty MacKay. The previous fall, while we were on vacation, Betty’s husband, Wayne, could hardly believe his wife’s description of our hissing, panting duck and had come over to our house to see the beast for himself. He had immediately hit it off with Hector, Betty had told us, and had gotten a kick out of the way the Muscovy followed him around the yard. When Linda phoned Betty to break the news that Hector had died, Betty paused. “I sure hate to have to tell Wayne,” she said. “He was just crazy about him.” I can’t think of another duck who had as many admirers as our twenty-five-cent Hector, and I just hope that the next world is solid enough for him to bite.
Other backyard developments helped distract us from grieving too much for Hector. Our Richmond Park duck, Richie, entered the spirit of spring full throttle and began pestering the females. We tried talking Stewart and Trevor into sharing their space with the newcomer. Though they reluctantly agreed to give the lad a break, they failed to factor in their own elevated hormone levels. Feather tugging fights erupted within minutes of Richie’s entry to their pen. “They’ll sort it out and be best buddies pretty quick,” I predicted. Instead, tempers flared to such an extent that interloper Richie hung back near the feed dish while the Khaki Campbell brothers duked it out between themselves. The fights disturbed the females next door, who lodged a formal complaint with their landlords by boisterously honking and quacking their disapproval. The only remedy was returning Richie to the harem in which we figured he was effectively a eunuch. To be on the safe side, we zealously discarded the females’ eggs as a surefire method of birth control. The last thing we needed was yet another duck.
Because ducks cannot crossbreed with geese, we never bothered to examine Liza and Hailey’s nests of infertile eggs, and that was our mistake. We permitted the two sisters their motherhood fantasies and let them each enjoy their nests. We only took away their eggs if one broke and interfered with the natural perfume of the pen—or if the geese grew obsessive about their nests and refused to leave them even to eat. Liza was getting close to this point when she started clinging to her nest with unusual vigor. We saw so little of her that I started to fear she might be having an aspergillosis flare-up.
“Liza?” As I bent down and peered into the doghouse, I confronted her thatch of white tail feathers. “Liza, are you okay?” I touched her between her shoulders. A soft double honk answered me from the shadows, but she showed no sign of budging. “Come on, you need to get some fresh air,” I told her, as I pressed my hands around her body and eased her through the portal, being careful not to bump her head as she extended her neck and shot me a surprised look. Once I set her on the gravel floor, she tooted indignantly and for a moment seemed poised to pop back into the doghouse. At the sound of an answering honk from her sister out in the yard, she changed her mind and trundled through the duck-pen door. As I followed her, I thought I heard a tiny unfamiliar voice. I stopped and surveyed the trees around the pen and the dense thicket of thorny bushes that leaned over the back fence in hopes of snagging me. I prided myself on knowing the songs, call notes, and squawks of two dozen or so species of birds that visited our property throughout the year and wondered if an exotic warbler was about to reveal itself. But when the briefly detected peeping didn’t recur, I put it out of my mind.
The next day Liza stayed behind once more while Hailey and the ducks fanned out across the lawn. Deciding it was probably time for her eggs to disappear, I urged her off her nest with a few encouraging words and a firm two-handed grab. After I had pulled her out of the doghouse, I was shocked to find a black and yellow puff of fluff racing back and forth and cheeping for the goose. I immediately let go of Liza. I could hardly have been more surprised if Howard, our dove, had laid an egg himself. Back inside the house, as I nursed a cup of coffee and tried to figure out how Liza had ended up with a baby, I remembered that just before Liza had taken possession of the doghouse, Marybelle had occupied it for a few days. Hidden among Liza’s baseball-size eggs had obviously lurked the fertilized product of an unholy tryst between Richie and our brown duck.
Too excited by the notion of a goose rearing a duckling to fade into my usual midafternoon nap, I planted myself in the living room, where I could keep an eye peeled for Linda’s return from a housecleaning job as I scanned the pages of Entertainment Weekly in vain for any dish about Pat Sajak and Vanna White. When my wife’s station wagon finally lurched into the driveway, I rushed to her door and greeted her with a malicious grin.
“What?” Linda demanded. “What’s going on?”
Grinning wider, I crooked my finger. “There’s a surprise for you out back.” Dropping her purse and keys on the front seat, Linda followed me out to the duck pen and gasped when I reached into Liza’s doghouse and presented her with a squirming, buggy-eyed duckling with enormous black feet and stubby gesticulating wings.
“Oh, my gosh!” Linda squealed. “Where did that come from?”
“Liza hatched it,” I told her. “She’s the surrogate mother. Richie’s the father.”
“Is that your baby, Liza?” Linda asked the goose and got a happy honk in return.
I wouldn’t have dared grab a duckling from a mother duck, but either Liza trusted me, or she knew that she was merely acting as a nanny. She didn’t try to bite me as Chloe once had and guarded the little one from the other females more with her sheer bulk than with any aggressive behavior.
Timmy, as Linda named him, definitely needed guarding and stuck close to the goose both in and out of the pen. Female ducks may be fanatical protectors of their own brood, but their maternal instincts do not extend to other ducklings. Any time Timmy stepped too far out of Liza’s shadow and a female was in nipping distance, he was in danger of receiving an unkindly poke from a beak. I thought that Marybelle might recognize the duckling as her own and volunteer as baby-sitter, but she was as ornery with him as the others.
I didn’t blame Marybelle for failing to recognize Timmy. Within a couple of weeks, he shot up out of pecking range until he stood only a tad shorter than his dad. By no stretch of the imagination did his coloration resemble either of his parents. His blotchy black and yellow down covering had yielded to jet-black adult plumage, with splotches of pure white on his breast. His feet, legs, and bill were also black, in contrast to Richie’s orange and Marybelle’s olive brown accessories. We had seen a duck like Timmy at Jacob Lester-meyer’s farm and wondered where he had come from, since none of the other petting zoo/meat department ducks were black. Now we knew that black-and-white was the hallmark of a White Pekin–Khaki Campbell domestic mallard mix.
It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But it seemed all of a piece with the complicated comings and goings of a year in which we had found and released a dove, given away a pair of Khaki Campbell mallard males, taken in a rabbit, lost a turkey to a mysterious animal attack, lost our parakeet Rossy and Muscovy Hector to cancer, gained a White Pekin duck, and ended up with a mixed-up duckling that had been brought up by a goose. In days gone by, if anyone had asked me if I owned any pets, I could readily rattle off their names. To answer that same question now, I would have to excuse myself, find a pen and sheet of paper, sit by myself for several minutes, and try to sort the problem out.