Oh DUCK!!!

So...I have the wood ducks in the flight pen, as I mentioned previously, and I’d gone in to freshen their food and water. Remember, wood ducks have app. 5 second long-term memories, so of course they didn’t remember that I’d just done this a few hours ago, nor that I’d been providing fresh food and water daily since their arrival in April.

Woodies go crazy, I ignore them, kneeling to freshen their water and dump out mealies in their scratch feed.

In the meantime, both woodies run shrieking to the other side of their pool, in the process knocking against the pen door...which I didn’t latch from the inside. See, standard procedure with flight pens is to have them latch from the inside AND the outside, so you can secure your birds even when you’re inside with them. I should have latched the door when I went inside, even though it was just a quick "in & out" food freshening trip. I didn’t latch the door...

I hear the door pop and look up to see one duck sitting outside the pen, looking - if possible - even more confused and frightened than usual.

Oh...duck. Duck, duck, DUCK. (Okay, that’s not exactly what I said, but it’s close enough. There may be children visiting this site.)

I rush to the door, the escaped duck goes screaming into the underbrush, and I tear off after him, using more language we won’t repeat here.

Did I mention that although these birds aren’t flighted yet, they can run pretty dadgummed fast??

I call my nephew - no answer. Try my parents. Mama picks up.

"Get down here NOW. Duck’s loose; I need help!"

Now, understand here, my mother has what we (mostly) affectionately call "the Mattie gene," named after her mother, my maternal grandmother. This means that her idea of speed is something akin to molasses in January. (No, really, my grandmother is the only person I know of who was actually late for her own funeral - but that’s a tale for another day.) She comes to my house with all deliberate haste - and I do mean "deliberate" - and announces, "I’m not wading through all that brush; I’ll just make sure he doesn’t get over here into the branch [that’s a small creek for you city types]."

So let the swearing commence in earnest as she loiters about the edges of the underbrush, blanket in hand to toss over Duckie, who had by this point acquired several less polite nicknames, should he come her way, and helpfully calling out to me, "He’s over there! No, there!"

I, meanwhile, am crashing through the underbrush, hoping I don’t step on any snakes while in hot pursuit of the errant duck. I did scare up a poor little rabbit, probably not too long on his own by the looks of him, and in one of those ludicrous moments of semi-clarity in the midst of total insanity, I paused long enough to say, "Hey, itta wabbit. Sorry I’m scaring you."

Then I take off again, slamming my head into a low-hanging branch (the tree type this time, not a creek). I nearly gave myself a concussion, so of course there was more colorful language, and the duck just kept running.

Let me mention here as an aside that it was one of those days when the temp was 90 in the shade and we had about 90 percent humidity, to boot. Just a lovely day to be crashing full-tilt through Snake Central, dodging fallen limbs, thorny vines, old fences and God-knows-what-kinds of poison. (Thankfully, I don’t normally break out from exposure to poison ivy or any of its kin.)

Duck runs under Mama’s flower shed, which is in my yard, too far from the flight pen, and he huddles there, panting like a dog. This is not good: wood ducks are stressy little birds and I don’t want him dying from stress or heat stroke, so I have a brilliant idea: grab the water hose and douse him while he’s under the shed, simultaneously cooling him down and maybe, just maybe, running him out, as well.

So now I’m kneeling in mud and muck, since the water is also spraying back on me and on the ground, while the $%&*# duck runs back into the underbrush!

Off I go in hot - quite literally - pursuit, and this time the duck tries to squeeze through an old fence section and gets stuck. Yeah! I have my duck!

Damage report: I’m soaked from sweat and muddy water; my mother is about to have a heat stroke; the still-penned duck is freaking out from all the commotion; the just-captured duck is sitting quietly in my arms, calm now that all the fuss has died down. I’m also now half an hour late feeding everybody else. Birds are screaming at me; deer are pacing impatiently in their pen.

Get Duckie safely back with his sibling, feed the birds and head for the deer pen, where I’m greeted with great enthusiasm. You see, deer adore the taste of human salt, and sweat contains lots of salt. I’m drenched in sweat, and by the time I get out of the deer pen, I’m also covered with deer spit.

And I still have the birds to feed...again...

Gawd, I love what I do!