Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

I thought I was going to groggily but joyfully announce that overnight four ducklings emerged from their eggs about ten feet from my pillow. Turns out I’m groggily but joyfully announcing five, and (possibly) counting. I first saw the initial quadruplets following, in that proud waddling avian line, their mother – and not just any mother. This is Pilar, the leader of the (previously) six-duck Funky Butte Ranch flock and the bird who, when she was just a duckling herself two years ago, leaped unannounced into the photo my publisher had asked me to take (about a minute before we went to press) for use in Part Five of Farewell, My Subaru. It resulted in one of my favorite shots of all time (if only because it showed the Funky Butte Ranch vegetable bounty deeply in the midst of Beginner’s Luck), and here it is again.

Pilar is the coolest duck I’ve ever known personally. Her views on issues of the day (like whether I’ve filled the temporary “pond” lately) are well-thought-out but expressed with a sort of reserved affection. And she’s quite the chill and proud mamma.

Who teaches new parents these things? After spending an entire month, 23 hours a day, brooding on her secret pile of eggs, suddenly Pilar was leading her proud and amazingly speedy progeny (tiny webbed feet-a-blur) to water and food, quacking away the rooster and other intruders with menacing waves of her checkered wing. It’s not like this dedicated mom learned her parenting skills at home. She never knew her mother — I got her from the feed store when she was one-day-old. Gives me confidence in my own somewhat ad hoc parenting skills.

Meanwhile, I spent the morning putting the final chicken-wire touches on the the emergency predator-proof nursery I and my sweetheart had thrown up along the outside half of the chicken coop. Among the potential threats? To name only a few: ravens, hawks, snakes, cats, dogs, skunks, raccoons, falcons, eagles, mountain lions, coyotes, javelina, and the aforementioned rooster, and those are just animals I’ve seen this week.

I can’t tear my eyes from this new family. I have the “Awww” Gene, which I don’t like to see deconstructed to a Darwinian knee-jerk. Sometimes something is just the C-word (Cute). Or maybe it’s that I love that the Funky Butte Ranch non-humans feel safe and healthy enough to reproduce (goats, chickens, ducks, humans, and owls so far, not counting rodents and insects). Except that soon there will be even more egg layers here, and my cholesterol already has to be through the roof. All this local living is in danger of killing me. I mean, as I’ve pointed out before, there must exist an upper limit to the number of fresh frittatas and omelets a fellow can eat.

Along those lines, as I was writing this Dispatch, I heard peeping outside the front door. I went to the porch to find a fifth fluffy blond-and-black duckling, completely belying the ugly duckling moniker, drinking out of the dogs’ bowl and following an Araucana chicken that it thought was its mother. I added the quintuplet to the duck nursery, to the dismay of its would-be-adoptive mother: the hen was more than happy to raise a duck, which she indicated by chasing me for a few seconds with snapping beak. But by the time I returned from the coop she (the chicken) had returned to sit on the nest Pilar had made, which looks to me to still have upwards of twenty, probably mixed species eggs in it. We’ll see what comes next. A baby dinosaur? This is getting to be a bit like the dwarves in The Hobbit showing up a few at a time to Bilbo’s front porch so as not to overwhelm him. To me, each new bird means more eggs I’m eventually going to have to work into my already Omega Three-rich diet.

Pilar, for her part, didn’t seem to mind, or even really notice, that her offspring productivity had increased 25% over the course of ten seconds. (It took almost five weeks to get the first four.) Everyone hereabouts except me seems to simply accept with quiet gratitude the seemingly unstoppable fertility at the Funky Butte Ranch. I accept it with loud gratitude.

I so wish I had grabbed the camera before I snatched the (for-now) latest duckling to safety – there’s something heartwarming about the adoptive parent/child bond, especially when it’s an inter-species one. I guess we’re comforted to know that kindness can be blind, that not everything exists to eat (or banish to cubicles) everything else. I still remember a Sesame Street clip about the symbiosis between an ox and the white bird that lived off the parasites on its back. With a hen leading a duckling to water, I probably would have had a YouTube Japan hit on my hands.

The Araucana hen is still on the nest as I upload this Dispatch. In the words of the great Tevye, “To life!”

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