We see by your outfit

That you are a wild duck

You see by our outfits

That we’re wild ducks too

We see by our outfits that we are all wild ducks

If you get an outfit you can be a wild duck too…

Many times in the dark unrelenting cold of a gray winters day, when the bone chilling water pulls all of the heat out of your webbed feet, you need a little something to pick you up. To help you maintain some perspective on why you’re a duck and why you’re still here on the Yellowstone river when everyone else has gone south to stick their feet in the warm sands of the winter migration site on the Gulf coast or maybe Maui. It can get pretty depressing to have your rump stuck in freezing cold water all day.

Ducks are not known for their singing voices, in fact if you’ve ever heard a bunch of them trying you know immediately that it is not their thing. It may sound a little like Rap but better, but they will never be mistaken for meadowlarks. What they’ve had to do to compensate is convert old western songs like “The Streets of Laredo” as they have done here, to a sort of talking blues style of singing that relates to duck stuff. Kind of like the gandy dancers did while they worked laying those rails as they built the railroads of America.

Sometimes the larger bull ducks, the one with deeper voices, will do old show tunes like “Old Man River” from Show Boat in the style of Paul Robeson, or the smaller ducks with higher voices will do stuff from “Cats” or “The Pajama Game”, but the Teal boys, the green-wing and blue-wing, like the ones in this image, and often the cinnamon are strictly western singers. They like the old classics, the ones they heard while watching old cowboy movies from the 40’s and 50’s. Guys sitting around a campfire singing lamentable songs to ease the strain of moving a herd along. Gene Autry is a big favorite with these fellows. I’ve even heard of some of the Teal boys sporting tattoos with “Gene is My Hero” and “I Winter at the Melody Ranch” under some of those feathers.

That’s what is going on in the picture above. The boys are singing to this stranger who just drifted up and can no longer feel the webbing in his feet, trying to give him some support and reason to hang in there, even though he’s making eyes like he’s going to break and run any minute for that warm southern clime. So the next time you’re driving along and pass a small ice-rimmed pond with a couple of ducks in it, stop and listen for a moment. You might just get serenaded.