You know, I’ve always enjoyed working with cattle, but I don’t own them. Not that I would mind owning them. The fact is, I just don’t have the money to be a rancher. The farm fix usually comes from helping a friend with his cattle in the spring and fall. Still, there is something about cattle. Listening to them. Watching them.
Yet, I’ll never be a cattle rancher unless someone close to me wins the lottery.
But a chicken farmer? I never thought I’d be raising chickens. I live in town. I have a small backyard. And I get more than enough bonding with the animal kingdom feeding the dogs. Yet here we are. Truthfully, I’m trying to leave as much of the chicken care to my wife as possible. She tends to her “flock” each day. How five chicks and two ducks became a flock, I don’t know. They’re still in a plastic tub in the garage, but soon they’ll move to the chicken run.
We tried it once before. Right after building the chicken pen, we lost the two four month old chicks when we went out of town for the weekend. We returned to find that one of the dogs tried to “play” with the two chicks. The play turned ugly when big paws and chicken bodies didn’t mix. Needless to say, we had to start over.
When we were contemplating our ‘flock,’ I suggested it would be cool to get two ducks and a goose, naming each of the ducks “Duck” and the goose (you guessed it, didn’t you), Goose. Of course my daughter latched on to it. My wife not so much. Still, when the ducks came home from the farm store, my daughter and I began calling them both duck. My wife wanted to call them Squeaker and Queenie. I looked at my daughter; we both shook our heads. My wife asked, “If we call them both duck how are we going to tell them apart.” Again I looked at my daughter before turning to answer my wife. She smiled. Then I went on to explain to my wife, “Well, Duck is yellow.” My daughter chimes in, “And Duck is black.”
Despite her best efforts, my wife ended up calling them Duck and Duck as well. Conversations centering on the ducks got a little crazy. “Duck is really growing. She is so calm, but Duck is a whiner. Squeaks all the time.”
Another trip out of town for me, my wife watching her flock while I’m gone; an after work chore turns into a ducking disaster. Giving the ducks a little water time, Duck decides to make a run for it while her back was turned. Picking up Duck, who had been pleasurably swimming in the little tub, and putting her back in the container with the chicks, my wife turns to look for Duck. Expecting the little beggar to waddled around like a penguin, she she began to pursue. What ensued was a duck chase around the length and width of the garage – under cars, between the legs of the band-saw, and around benches. Duck was slapping those little webbed toes against the concrete as fast as she could. She dashed away; turning on a dime the little quacker was weaving and dodging like an NFL wide receiver. A head fake here, a juke there, a spin toward the opposite direction, all leaving my wife at her wits’ end.
After twenty minutes of hot-pursuit, my wife had to call in the reinforcements. The daughter and her boyfriend teamed up. Still, the webbed-slinger stayed on the run, until cornered between the two. It looked one way, headed in the other, and spun back before finding her path blocked by the trashcan, and two slightly more agile humans.
Four days later we remembered the garage camera, three out of four of us hoping for a laugh. Unfortunately, the camera only kept the video for two days, and the duck race was lost to the world except through memory. I guess the conclusion to this story is that while caring for two ducks, my wife got ducked by Duck, and Duck didn’t give a duck. That’s just ducked up.
