Strange chicks

We had just moved to our present farm and were getting started with chickens and gardening. There was even a beaver pond on our property! Our neighbour, who rented the hay field, was mowing next to the beaver pond when a duck flew off her nest and right into the mower. John climbed down, looked on the ground and found the nest and nine eggs, which were already “ticking,” just about to hatch. He put them in his hat and brought them to our house. We didn’t have an incubator, but we had something even better: a silkie bantam hen, which was very interested in hatching something, anything!

It must have been the easiest sitting ever. Nine eggs put under a chicken at 11:00 a.m. By the next morning, nine beautiful, fluffy. . . ducklings.

For the first few days, it went okay. They peeped like chicks, huddled under their adoptive mama’s wings for warmth, and came to pick food when their mama called. Except for rounded beaks, they seemed all right. Perhaps a slight disfigurement? Mama Hen probably just called them “schnozzically advantaged.”

Swimming lessons

Then the human children interfered. They meant well. They even sacrificed their old plastic swimming pool. Dug it into the ground, filled it with water. Opened the brooder house and let the hatchlings loose. Trouble. The little “chicks” dived right in and paddled merrily in circles. They snatched flying insects, drowning insects, any insects really. There would be no need for duck starter from the feed store.

Mama called and called. Strutted nervously around the edge of the pond, called more, began to suffer bantam angst, then silky angst, then. . . I guess she decided that if modern human moms can go rollerblading with their ten-year-olds, she could, well, go swimming.

Silky bantam jumped into the pool. She began sinking. She retreated faster than Saddam Hussein’s “Mother of All Battles” army. That bedraggled bantam clucked around the edge of the pond, resigned to letting her strange children ignore her, swim, play, feed and grow.

Free at last

And what grew most seemed to be their beaks, their noses, their schnozzolas. There could be no doubt that the duck eggs we had saved from becoming crow food after their mother was killed by John’s hay mower were not from the lordly mallard, but the Jimmy Durante of ducks: shovelers. Spoonbills.

By August, all the primary flight feathers were in. Time for freedom. Shall we band them? Nah, better not: otherwise we’d feel terrible if we were duck hunting and shot one of our own.

Freedom for the ducks, now shorn of their “-lings.” Freedom to be a chicken again for the faithful silky mother who was promptly killed by the barred rock rooster when she returned to the flock. Freedom to find a lesson or two. Ain’t nature grand? Ain’t it cruel? Which?