The advent of freezing weather in Northamptonshire is making me worry about my ducks. I have eight of them of four different breeds now sitting on the base of a stone sculpture in the middle of my ornamental pond, some of them with their heads tucked under their wings, as if hiding from the world, and others staring disconsolately across the great stretch of ice surrounding them. The pond normally protects them against foxes, because foxes don’t swim; but as soon as it is covered with ice, the foxes can walk across it and massacre the entire flock if they feel like it. A man at the local garage told me that exactly this had happened to his ducks one winter.
The booklet I bought on duck ‘management’ warns of another danger faced by ducks when their pond gets iced over. ‘Realising that the ducks need water, you may be tempted to go out on the lake and punch a hole in the ice for the ducks to drink,’ it says. ‘They will soon find the water and slip in for a swim, but as they are surrounded by an edge of ice it will be difficult, if not impossible, for them to scramble out, and having become exhausted by their efforts, they will soon succumb to the cold water. Many ducks are lost this way every year.’ So the booklet says you should provide them with bowls of fresh water twice a day, which is a depressing task in this vile weather and when you are suffering from a cold.
I always used to think that ducks were much nicer than chickens, more beautiful to look at and more amusing to watch. The contrast between their graceful glide over water and their clumsy waddle on land is especially entertaining. On the other hand, I have never been keen on chickens. Their neurotic jerky movements, their constant peck-peck-pecking, and their total lack of any anthropomorphic qualities have made me incapable of feeling any kind of warmth towards them. But the longer I keep chickens (and I have eight of them as well), the more I like them, and the more I find myself guiltily preferring them to my ducks.
This is partly because ducks, despite their greater sleekness, make much larger and more disgusting messes (though chickens are bad enough in this respect). They are also extremely greedy and gobble up the food I give them so frantically that I am surprised it doesn’t choke them. The chickens are given the same pellets to eat, but they peck each pellet individually with surgical precision, while the ducks just gulp down great bills-full of them as if they were starving. They consume by far the largest share of the poultry food, which with dispiriting frequency and at great expense I have to heave back in heavy sacks from the garden centre.
Another problem with ducks is collecting their eggs. I bought my ducks a little floating wooden house, hoping that they might lay in it, but they only rarely do so. And when they do, their eggs are usually coated with excrement. They must be laying most of their eggs somewhere else, but I can’t discover where — apart from the occasional egg I see gleaming amid the water-lily plants a foot beneath the water’s surface. Do ducks lay eggs while swimming?
But apart from their revolting habits, ducks now also seem to me less interesting and less individual than chickens. The ducks go around as a gang, greeting the arrival of their food with a great collective hullabaloo of quacking and squawking, while the chickens just silently get on with feeding themselves in their own private ways. Some clearly have more aggressive characters than others and are more obsessed with the pecking order. But there’s something touching about the way they all, even the stroppy ones, snuggle up together at night in their huts, waiting to be shut in as a protection against foxes. And as for eggs, they lay them dutifully in the boxes provided for them, not in any old place like the ducks.
Let’s hope that my ducks somehow survive the winter, for while they are living on the pond, there is no way I can herd them into any kind of shelter for the night. And if they do survive, they should try to produce some ducklings in the spring if they want to reclaim their primacy in my affections. For who has ever been able to resist a duckling?
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