Ducks

We went to the Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary (aka "Fat, Sassy, Feathered") today, with several friends. Reifel's a cool place. It's a privately funded and operated wildfowl refuge, so that whenever the provincial government comes up with boneheaded ideas about how wildlife refuges should be run (lately the profit motif has been stressed rather more than is entirely polite), Reifel can basically respond, "Bite us. Lovingly. We know what we're doing, and we're private." And things go on just as they have done, and the birds are happy. As a woman said to me in passing today, "It's so peaceful, here."

Their showcase residents are, in winter, lesser snow geese, and year-round, sandhill cranes, long-billed dowitchers, and herons, elegant to a fault; a Great Horned Owl nesting pair, plus eagles and hawks that return every year, and transients such as Nashville Warblers that pop in once in a great while. But the mainstay population, the great unwashed, are the ducks.

Hundreds of ducks. Mostly mallards, though there are also, in any given year, greater or lesser concentrations of golden-eyes, widgeons, and wood ducks. Also shovellers, and some domestics that have at some point earlier in their lives snuck under the wire and fled domesticity. And several others that I'm just not remembering.

Hanging with the ducks, irritably, though not year round, are several flocks of greater and lesser Canada geese. And even more numerous concentrations of hedge-dwellers – kinglets, swallows, sparrows, chikadees, redwings, wrens – Little Brown Jobs, or The Usual Suspects.

But it's the ducks that casual and serious birders notice at Reifel, no matter their reason for visiting. They're everywhere—napping and nattering, bathing and begging from the parking lot on in. Ducks, ducks, ducks, all wanting birdseed. Small children, with their first paper baggies of seed, quickly find themselves surrounded by clamouring, pecking, fussing, arguing, waddling creatures who're never still, and never blink.

They are clowns who have never laughed, wild pets who won't tolerate petting, but who will clamber into a lap or lean over a shoulder to get birdseed. Feeding them is a peculiarly rejuvenating exercise, much like keeping a cat, but without the fuss with cans or litter, or the reward of a warm, purring creature butting your hand for more ear rubs.

There are serious and dedicated birders who go to Reifel. They carefully wend their way through the hordes of ducks, carrying their telescopes and tripods, binos and cameras round their necks, bird books in their pockets. What they think of the ducks I don't know, they've never said, but I imagine it's on the lines of, "Ducks? Yes, ducks. Quite common, ducks."

And there are people like me, who hang around with semi-serious birders, and try to learn what we can from them, but who are so easily and delightfully distracted by the crowding, shoving, nipping, jostling mobs of blunt-billed bellies-with-wings. There's nothing quite like the peace of late afternoon shattered by a great flapping of wings as a duck, sensing the approach of a seed-bearing human, rises from its pond, tops a blackberry hedge, then arrows down a gravel path at human-head level to land exactly and precisely at the feet of the only one in the group who is currently dispensing birdseed.

I sat alone on a bench for awhile, holding my last baggie of the good stuff, while a flock wandered to and fro before me. I rustled slightly, incidently even, while shifting my weight. Fourteen bodies ceased moving. Fourteen heads shot up on high alert. Fourteen pairs of eyes focused on me.

I laughed, yes, and I also tossed out more seed. It's only fair, after all.