Quackers Demonstrates Duck Decorum

Since Quackers was the first thing the ducklings saw when they chipped themselves out of their eggs, they were convinced that she was their mother. They had no other mother, and Quackers was a proud and dedicated mother to them. In single file, they followed their adopted mother across the grass, through a thicket of flowers and down a short terrace to the moist mulch field below. Quackers showed them how to sort through the mulch with their beaks for worms and bugs. She used her wide beak like a shovel. Sometimes her beak got piled high with dirt and mulch with mud smeared all over her face. Quackers lovingly demonstrated to her chicks how you could smell the bugs when you got close. She showed them how to gobble up and swallow the worms and pill bugs, and they followed her example. What fun it was to be snuffling around in a big crowd of kindred spirits scavenging for juicy morsels to eat!

The next day, two of the eight chicks in the clutch disappeared. Some children in the neighborhood found one of the chicks waddling alone down the alleyway behind the garden fence. Apparently, the chicks had found a hole under the back fence and had slipped out onto the urban alleyway where danger lurked in every nook and cranny. The children returned the one chick to the garden. Quackers had been searching frantically for her little son and was amazingly relieved to get him back under her wing. The other chick was never again found. The kind woman found the little hole under the fence and filled it up with heavy rocks.

Each night at dusk, Quackers returned to the wire cage to retire for the night. Her straw nest was cushioned with the soft, fluffy down that she plucked from below her own feathers in order to make a squashy, warm bed for her baby ducks. One by one, the ducklings would follow her into the comfortable nest within the wire cage and find a place to rest under Quackers’ strong wings. Quackers would stretch her legs lifting her large body up to accommodate spaces for her progeny. When the chicks were all settled into the nest, she would hunker down right onto their heads and fluff up her feathers to keep them warm. Each night, they slept securely huddled together after the kindly woman came to set the hook in the door latch to protect the ducks through another night.

Up until now, Quackers had been alone a long time with no one to talk to. Although the ducklings could only chirp teeny baby language, Quackers was overjoyed to have company and some other ducks to chat with. She felt very important that the chicks followed her every move, and completely obeyed her when she instructed them. Days and weeks passed as the ducklings learned all they needed to know from their mother, and they rapidly grew.