the marsh is busy today! already four or five days have gone by out there and it's only 3:00. at dawn there was a brilliant pink sunrise, then the sun and all shades of clouds came and went in various combinations, turning the water from slate to green to blue and back again. now there is a fierce and chilly wind more reminiscent of february but looking for all the world like a bright summer's day otherwise.
and so many birds! the gulls keep coming, gathered at the water's edge staring intently but no one seems to be eating anything; i have no idea what they're up to. at least 60 of them by now, a veritable convocation. the usual four suspects from the huge flock of farm geese were back for a while until our resident male mallard chased them off the island. he is one feisty duck that guy; he has no patience with any interlopers whether giant goose or tiny bufflehead. he is also giving his wife no rest. if there are no ducklings soon it won't be for lack of effort.
i worry about those ducklings. last year one made it - we didn't move here in time to know how many they started with. we named her "baby" and she stuck with her parental units, ronny and foxy, until about a month ago. she was being courted by a young guy marty named elvis - he trailed behind the family of three for maybe six weeks, then one day we realized baby and elvis had moved out, presumably to their own grassy apartment somewhere nearby.
when we had ducks in freestone i had to bring the hatchlings inside until they started to fledge lest the owls and minks have them as snacks. this made the laundry room a super messy nursery for the entire spring and summer and put a rather significant damper on my affection for the little darlings, especially by august. marty promised me that once the weather got colder they would instinctively know to stop fertilizing their eggs - not to worry, he said, "this is how mother nature practices birth control."
yet a lovely late afternoon that october stands out in my mind like it was yesterday. i was lounging on the bed with an iced tea and a riveting mystery on one of those rare and precious occasions when i had managed to bribe the 12 year old from next door into entertaining the kids downstairs so i could sneak away and take a secret break, something they would never have allowed, no matter how happy they were, if they suspected i was enjoying myself without them.
it was into this blissful interlude that i heard marty come up the stairs, home from work. how nice, i thought, he's coming to say hello and compare days. but what was all that peeping?? sheepishly he stood before me overflowing with ducklings, ducklings in his pockets, ducklings in his shirt, ducklings everywhere. they really are very cute, no question. but i had finally gotten the laundry room scrubbed out and that sour ducky smell banished. poor marty was clearly abashed and said apologetically, yet still wanting to retain his standing as mr. nature, "i guess this must be what they mean when they refer to 'a late hatch'."
right after we got them settled into a large cardboard box with a pie pan of water and a pyrex dish of feed - you can picture how long it takes for eight baby ducks to turn their capacious fully outfitted new home into a goopy mucky permanent mess (that would be under 10 seconds if you weren't sure) - i immediately made an emergency after hours call to amy, the head of sam's pre-school, and said in my most optimistic, outdoor voice, have i got an educational project for you!
fortunately amy is still speaking to me, in fact we are good friends to this day. but unlike the geese there is no lesson here, no moral to the story. after that long smelly spring, summer - and fall - there were many more inundations of ducks and ducklings in our life. we learned nothing. no sanity bell ever went off while wandering through the feed store, the poultry barn at the sonoma county fair in california or the mofga common ground fair in maine.
obviously ducks are labor intensive and noisy; above all though ducks are hilarious and make us happy. no doubt if the marsh hadn't come with its own pair of mallards we would have found some somehow, somewhere, because we are suckers for ducks.
Life on the Salt Marsh is a journal of what i am learning and experiencing in this breathtakingly beautiful place, where the Dyer and Sheepscot, both tidal rivers, meet and merge.
Sweet Last Days of Summer
Author
- Rev. Mary
- Midcoast Maine
- Rev. Mary is a Unitarian Universalist minister who served congregations in San Francisco, Sonoma County, Houston, Marblehead and Winchester MA, and New Orleans, in a variety of ways. She is President and co-founder of Gulf Coast Volunteers for the Long Haul and has led 14 service trips to Louisiana and Mississippi since a few weeks post-Katrina. She has 3 children, Sam, 22, Julia, 26, and Jason, 41, and the best spouse in the universe, Marty. She was diagnosed with ALS/Lou Gehrig's disease in 2006. Rev. Mary can be reached at duckdreams at gmail.com. Due to her illness her ability to reply is unlikely but she would enjoy hearing from you if that's OK.
From Mary's Journal in December
after simple surgery turned into a nightmare: "the pain has been excruciating and for 3 days was unrelenting, even breathing was an agony. i tried to picture our mallard in maine who i studied one day when it was freezing cold, windy, pouring down rain and he was in his spot in the grass all tucked up and i tried to imagine how he could handle the elements. i decided he must go very deep inside and have duck dreams. so i tried to emulate him."