There’s a certain air of elitism that comes with things like red carpets, penthouse suites, processionals, and ornate fountains. We can imagine a movie scene where the leading lady emerges from the palatial top floor of the hotel with all eyes on her. She makes her way down an opulent staircase, draped in deep red, and meets her beau in front of a display of water-spouting cherubs carved from Italian marble. That’s typically fantasy, though—made in Hollywood and shipped to the silver screens across the world. However, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, such an event is an everyday occurrence.
With one minor change, of course. The Hollywood starlet is anything but. She, and the others who parade down the red carpet, are ducks.
Yes, ducks, as in the waterfowl that quack. Oh, and they’re not meeting their dinner dates. The ducks are going for a swim.
The Peabody Hotel Duck March is a daily tradition dating back decades. In the 1930s, the hotel’s general manager, Frank Schutt, and a friend went duck hunting in Arkansas but came up empty. Then, as now, duck hunters used decoys to attract potential targets. While modern duck hunters use wooden (i.e., fake) ducks as decoys, back when Schutt and his friend went hunting, it was still acceptable to use live ones. So when they returned to Memphis without having killed any ducks, they weren’t entirely empty-handed—they still had the live decoy ducks with them. According to the Peabody Hotel’s website, they also were a little too friendly with some Jack Daniel’s whiskey, which explains why they thought it’d be funny to let their live ducks go for a swim in the hotel’s very expensive fountain made from a solid piece of Italian marble.
Thankfully, the guests appreciated the humor and the cuter-than-typical creatures splashing away. The hotel’s owners agreed and decided that ducks should be a permanent addition to the fountain. Of course, if you’re going to be silly, you as might as well do it in a big, ostentatious way. The hotel constructed a home for the ducks—called the “Royal Duck Palace”—as part of the hotel’s penthouse. And every day at 11 A.M., the hotel rolls out the red carpet for the ducks—literally. The ducks are led from their palace down the temporarily red-clad stairs and into the water as guests watch and applaud. Often, a celebrity is invited to be the marshal of the duck parade, leading the special guests as they make their way to the water.
While you’ll find ducks in the fountain at the Peabody, you won’t find them on the menu at any of the hotel’s restaurants. The Peabody stopped serving the cousins of their guests in 1981 and claim to be the only place in the United States (if not the world) that features a French restaurant not serving duck.
Wooden decoys replaced live ducks in the early part of the twentieth century, and by the 1970s, these painted carvings became popular collectables. There’s a surprisingly lucrative market for high-end ones. In early 2007, a wooden duck sold at auction for over $850,000, and later that year, two more in private sales went for more than $1 million apiece.