All year round ducks can be seen everywhere in Florida. They can be found foraging for food in the backyards of houses and on the streets, and occasionally even roaming on major roads, where the traffic is fast and dangerous. As a result, it’s not unusual to see a dead duck by the side of the road, although far fewer ducks than other animals like raccoons, cats, or other fast running animals are killed on the roads.
Most of them don’t die that horribly, not because they are smarter than their nimbler cohabitants. Rather, their easy and slow movements, even in crossing busy streets, often can be the reason that they don’t get run over. Drivers, who can be agitated a great deal by an old slow driver in front of them, usually don’t want to run over a duck. Sometimes drivers have to come to a complete stop to allow an innocent looking duck to finish her walk to the other side of the road.
I have done this more than couple of times. In a most recent episode, I was moving along with other cars, going with the flow. Then for no reason the car in front of me slowed down significantly, and finally came down to a dead stop in the left lane of a major road, in the morning rush hour. Although I am a conservative driver, I slowed down after that car but still didn’t expect that it would stop. I wondered, with a slight annoyance and a mild curse to the other driver, why it would stop. Then I saw the driver veer to the right and sped off. Left in front of me was a bewildered female duck, standing there motionless.
I honked the horn, although I knew from experience that would mean nothing to the duck. As expected, she didn’t move at all. Cars and other bigger vehicles zoomed by me on the right lane. From the rear view mirror I could see a few cars patiently sat behind me, waiting for the opportunity to take off once the right lane traffic is clear. I honked the horn couple of more times, even waved at her, all to no avail. She stood there as quiet as before. I finally decided that she needed more help. I stepped out of my car and walked toward her. She saw me and started moving away from me. If I continued toward her, she would be forced into the right lane, which might mean being hit by a vehicle, the right lane traffic didn’t slow down despite that the drivers could clearly see that I was in the midst of the traffic.
So I stopped, thinking about how to get the duck to leave the road and not get hit by a car. I even tried to stop the traffic in the right lane. As I was moving slowly to attempt to do that, an epiphany seemed to have befallen on the duck, she suddenly opened her wings and flew over the bushes in the median divider. I saw her landed on the side walk on the other side of the street, safe and sound.
Thus a life threatening adventure for the duck ended peacefully. For me and the drivers behind me, it was couple of minutes of delay, and I didn’t hear any angry blaring horns during the whole time.
In my neighborhood I see ducks every day. They have been spoiled by the friendliness of the people and dogs such that the ducks do not know anything about danger. The innate alertness in other animals seem to have gone from the genes of the ducks. When cars approach them, they don’t yield, instead, cars veer to avoid the ducks.
I have never seen anyone hitting a duck but I did see some ducks apparently killed by cars. Like any other dead animals we can see almost every day on the roads, dead ducks don’t evoke much emotion in me. But once I saw some dead ducklings and the scene remains vivid in my mind, even it has been quite a few years.
That happened in a park on a pleasant afternoon in March. The weather in March in South Florida is the most enjoyable. It is also the breeding season for ducks. In a small parking lot in the park, I saw some ducklings and among them, two were dead. Apparently they were killed just a very short time ago, as the other ducklings were still around. Just about maybe couple of feet away there was a short wall about just a foot high. Behind the wall there were thick plants, and in the vegetation there was a mother duck in a highly agitated state. She watched her ducklings below hopelessly trying to come up to join her. But the wall was too high for the ducklings. Thus the agonized mother watched her crying ducklings below. This must have been the scene ever since she flew into the bush when the car ran over her children. All mothers love their children. For ducks, the first instinct when her life was in danger was to save her own life first. Even if she tried to scoop up her ducklings with her wings, she probably could have done nothing. If she did that, the whole family would probably have gotten killed.
So the unlucky or less agile ducklings got killed, a crude way of applying Darwin’s principles by the careless driver to the defenseless ducks.
I saw the situation and decided to help. I squatted down and tried to pick up the ducklings, which looked like just one or two days old. Naturally they tried to run away from me. But their mother was just over there, so they didn’t run away for too far. It was easy for me to pick up them one by one and hoist each one up to under the wings of their mother. The reward I got from the mother was some hard bites to my hands. I had never been bitten so hard by a duck, if I ever did get bitten at all.
That was the only time I saw ducklings killed by humans. Most of the time ducklings simply disappear, day by day. By my observation, not in any way scientific, about half of the ducklings do not grow into adulthood. When a new duck family appear in the streets of my neighborhood, I usually observe them with curiosity, sympathy and appreciation of the work of nature grow in my mind every time I see the new family become smaller and smaller. I have conjectured about how a duckling gets lost. There are many nocturnal small animals here and the ducklings may have become food for them. Having not witnessed such kind of thing happening, I don’t know if my theory is right or not.
Many ducklings failed to survive may in fact be attributable more to the survivability of themselves than their predators. I did witness such a thing happen just in the last March.
It was again the breeding season for ducks. I saw a family of three, a mother, a father, and a single child. From the very first day I saw the lone duckling I had a feeling that she would not survive. Alongside the fact that she didn’t have any siblings, which was an indication of the parents’ weakness or ability to survive, she looked weak. She walked slowly, unlike the other new born ducklings that usually skylark around their mother.
I watched this family every morning when I drove by them, they usually hung out at the same place in the morning. In the evening when I get back from work, they can be seen there again. One day, which was may be the 4th or 5th day of the duckling’s appearance, she was dead.
A dead duckling was not unusual. I know most of them are dead because they no longer can be seen following their mother. But for this loss, the unusual thing was the grief exhibited by the parents. By the dead duckling, just a few feet apart from each other, the mother and father sat by the tiny motionless black feathered creature. They didn’t move. I drove by and noticed the scene and went to work.
They were still there after I came back from work. I cannot be certain if they moved during the day, but they seemed to be dead themselves. They sat there exactly the same way as I saw them in the morning. The neighbor, to whom the lawn belongs, might have placed a paper plate by them, on which there was some water and morsels of food.
Ducks can’t cry. Humans can cry and I didn’t cry, but I felt my eyes wet. May be the ducks stayed there for some other reason, not because of any grief. Do ducks lament? I am not a zoologist and I don’t know. Maybe they were too well fed to leave. Ducks usually eat to death if you feed them. They would not stop eating if there is anything edible around them. But on that day the two ducks didn’t eat the food placed in front of them.
The next day the parents could not be found there anymore. If they were, I couldn’t recognize them from the many ducks that roam on the neighborhood streets every day. The dead duckling must have been eaten or thrown into the garbage.
Remarkable things can happen to ducks and allow me to tell a happier duck story. Just about two weeks ago that the unlucky duckling died, there was a bigger family came into existence and almost of the ducklings eventually survived. To this day I can still recognize the full-fledged ducks, which were ducklings a few months back.
From the beginning I saw this was a strong group of ducklings. Unlike the other small family, this family’s father could not been seen and I can’t tell who is the father of the youngs. The mother looked too young, she looks still very young today, even younger now than some of her male children. For anyone else who has not paid close attention to them, she would not be thought as the mother of the other ducks that have grown bigger in size than her.
Yet such a young and small mother raised a big and healthy family. There were 13 ducklings when I first saw them. That was probably just one or two days after the ducklings were born. For unknown reasons I decided to observe them and see how many of the ducklings would survive. Just couple of days later, the number of ducklings dwindled down to 8, a significant loss but for ducklings, such a loss rate is not out of ordinary. A few days more later, one duckling got lost again. The retinue following the mother was now easy to count.
Then the seven ducklings grew rapidly. Every day I saw them, they looked different from yesterday. I was still expecting more losses but if seven is lucky to humans, it probably means even more for ducks. The seven never stayed far from their mother and I knew that all of them would survive after about three weeks, when they have doubled or tripled their sizes and weights.
I watched them with interests and occasionally talked about them with my wife, who didn’t pay much attention to them but generally got very excited when she sees a train of ducklings. Ducks grow very fast. In couple of months their wings have fully grown. Although one can usually tell that they are now the teenagers, some of them by now have left their parents to live on their own.
But that’s not the case for this family. The seven children and the ever young looking mother still can be seen in the same area in the neighborhood every day, although their territory now spans farther and they cannot be always seen at the same place every day.
Recently just about couple of months ago another family of seven children grew up. I didn’t see where they grew up but noticed them once a few days. Their territory probably was not visible from the street side and now the children have grown up, they can be seen now. This family has both mother and father. The seven children are equally healthy as the other family.
As I much as I love the ducks I do not feed them. I did that once and never repeated my generosity. Even if I wanted to feed them, I stayed away from my house. I learned the lesson. After the day I fed the ducks, I woke up in the morning and found my drive way littered with droppings. I didn’t mind much but my wife convinced me that ducks are not supposed to be cared this way.
Now I see the two families of seven children less and less. As the children grow up, they are not easy to be recognized anymore. Most of the children now have left their parents, although occasionally I see them together. I sometimes take a young female duck as the mother who raised the seven lucky ducklings, but I can no longer be as certain as before, when she was always accompanied by seven smaller ducks. Autumn is coming and soon after that, there is another spring.
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