Tag Archives: Ducks

Last Tango In Bosque

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Sandhill cranes are one of the bird species that uses dance as part of their mating ritual. Many species do this but since we’re talking about Sandhill cranes we don’t care about them. In fact let’s ignore them entirely. They can get their own post from some other blogger.

Sandhills have a unique childhood as they are constantly uprooted, traveling back and forth between various nesting and feeding grounds, never staying in one place for more than a few months. They are the avian equivalent of the Roma or as they ‘re more commonly known, travelers, or gypsies. Consequently they have developed some bad habits such as stealing grain out of farm fields, throwing raucous parties where they spend the day singing ribald songs and dancing, and consequently are unwelcome in many of the areas they frequent.

It’s the dancing we’re addressing in this post. The uninhibited, wildly abandoned, provocative dancing. This is primarily a “G” rated blog but occasionally we come across behavior that we simply must point out so that you, the reader, can take what ever protective measures you choose to keep your children, or even yourselves, from being unduly influenced by this hedonistic display of licentiousness.

We were shocked when we came across this overt display in the normally sedate Bosque del Apache bird refuge in southern New Mexico. This is a place where thousands of birds congregate during the winter. Snow geese, Ross’s goose, ducks of all kinds and you could move from one place in the refuge to another and see these various birds and ducks behaving in a civilized, normal manner, and aside from an infrequent squabble, never exhibiting any aberrant behavior.

But then this quiet garden of Eden was discovered by the travelers, or lets call a bird a bird, the Sandhill cranes. Suddenly the harmony of this gentle resting place was shattered all to heck, excuse us but an event like this moves us to use harsh language, by the arrival of flocks upon flocks of these noisy, argumentative, unapologetic, cranes and everything changed.

Suddenly the blatant exhibition of their sexually charged mating rituals, which they held right out in the open for anyone to observe, was rampant. Everywhere you looked there was dancing, and as the more worldly among you surely know what that leads to, we don’t need to follow that path to its conclusion.

Surely a group of individuals whose moral compass has gone so wildly astray could not prevail but sadly, that is not the case. Due to their unrestricted behavior there are now thousands more of these Sandhill cranes and there has been a huge effect on the surrounding areas. Where once this had been a quiet farming area, now the fields are decimated by the hungry opportunistic cranes. Farms have been abandoned and the empty homesteads litter the edges of the refuge. What were once prosperous farms have been turned into the playgrounds of these dancing, squawking, devil-may-care, footloose wanderers.

Above you can see two of these young cranes beginning what is one of the favorite dances of these unfortunately immoral birds, the Tango. Brought up from South America by a group of Argentinian travelers and introduced to their naive American cousins this new dance has swept through the flocks like the pox it is. Now you can see countless pairs of Sandhills performing this dance before heading into the privacy of the surrounding reeds to complete their mating ritual.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any antidote to this terrible affliction and all we can expect is to see more and more of it in the future. One hesitates to use the word shameful on a group of individuals whose only way of defending their actions is by a strangled sort of gargling that is their voice, but for civilized people it is hard to accept their licentiousness. At this point we are suggesting that the public refrains from bringing small children to the refuge during what is now called the mating season. We hope that by person-cotting the refuge the birds will get the hint to tone down their behavior and we’ll see the last tango at Bosque.

We See By Your Outfit…

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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.

All Redheads To The Front

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There are fast ducks and there are slow ducks. These are fast ducks, in fact they look fast just standing still. Slow ducks would be your Mallards, especially the really fat ones you see around the city park. Those are so slow they can’t get out of their own way, 10 mph tops, while these Mergansers are the Formula One members of the duck world. We’re talking open wheels, spoilers, drafting, no fuel restriction Indy cars.  230mph speedsters that only have one way of getting there and that is, Flat out. This young brood decided they needed to determine who was going to sit on the pole this season so everywhere they went it was web feet to the metal and don’t be last. These are fast lane ducks and they don’t have time for idle chit chat, in fact they rarely idle, everything is redline with these guys so if you see them coming just step aside or you’re going to get wet plus you’re going to have all those embarrassing web foot tracks all over your face because these guys don’t slow down. See you in turn one.

Cold Duck Warm Feet

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The last time I was at Bosque del Apache I noticed a new phenomenon amongst some of the ducks there. I had always wondered if ducks had nerves or any feeling at all in their feet as they could stand on ice or in ice cold water and act as if they didn’t feel any cold whatsoever. How do they do that I would wonder. Finally when my curiosity got the better of me I called on our resident duckologist, Dr. Bils Orange, from our Oslo affiliate, to answer my questions.

The Institute of Regained Knowledge or IRK as it is known throughout the academic world, has affiliate branches in nearly every backward country in the known world, like France ( the Sorbonne calls us ) England (Oxford, we’ve stopped taking their calls because they always call collect) and so on ad nauseam. We have a wealth of talent that we can draw from to get the information we need instantaneously. The Worldwide Headquarters of our media Empire sits like a fat, but ugly, spider in the exact center of this web of information, controlling its flow and deciding with all possible fairness and at what price, who gets this information. We may run the show but we glory in it. It is a little known fact that what we know as the world-wide web was actually invented here (regardless what Al Gore says)  at the Institute of Regained Knowledge, or IRK, back in 1926 way before the introduction of the computer. We’re very proud of that.

It turns out that the answer to my question was something I never could have imagined. Ducks have been fooling us for sometime. They feel the cold, I mean Duh, its ice, what we see as indifference on their part is actually a numbness that spreads up to their little tiny brains and freezes them solid. Recently though some enterprising members of the Duckus Aquaticus, (Latin for birds with flat feet) have begun showing up with the ability to actually stand on that freezing ice and be as warm and toasty as you or I would be standing on the cooktop in our own kitchens. The answer is as simple as it is mysterious but that is usually the case when you make things up, I mean, search for new facts. Ducks feet have secretly been fitted with a new form of thermoplastic outer covering made from the same stuff that didn’t make it onto the last shuttle flight.  Where could they have obtained this stuff we asked. We thought maybe Cabela’s but after checking both their print and online catalog found that even they had nothing like this. Finally after an exhaustive search we were told by an unnamed source that this procedure was done at a secret clinic in Mexico. It’s orange, the foot covering not the clinic, it looks like a duck foot, it has those little bumps that ducks have on their feet, and the average or even below average person cannot tell it from a real ducks foot. The properties of this material appear to be nearly mind bending. All the duck has to do is stand on the ice where the sun can shine on it and within moments the solar produced heat begins to flow and literally melts the ice below them. They simply stand there until they melt through the ice and then being in open water they can begin feeding much quicker than the non-footwear wearing ducks can even move, hence their robust and chubby appearance. Dr. Bils Orange is presently taking a crash course in Mayan which he mistaken thought was still spoken widely in Mexico, and will then track down the clinic where this procedure is practiced, find out the straight skinny and we will then spill the beans, I mean, share this information with the world. We need to get our IBM Selectric fixed so that we can publish this startling new information and soon you will see it in major sources of academic excellence everywhere. Meanwhile you, our loyal readers, get a first hand preview of this incredible new finding. That’s it, mystery solved. Chalk up one more successful research project from IRK and we’re on to the next. Watch for us at strange events everywhere.