Visitors Most Fowl But Still Welcome

The ducks seemed as annoyed as I was confused; certainly the female. She was clearly peeved with the other two, both males who would not leave her alone. At one point, she ran under a large bush in our front yard. The males followed. She came out. They didn’t.

Apparently the inability of the male to find his way out of a mess can be found in many species.

With the males searching for the exit sign, the female had a chance to catch her breath. She looked at me. I looked back. She wanted to know why wasn’t I helping her. I wanted to know why she and her friends were there.

“Not my friends,” her expression said.

I’ve been an Oregonian for 16 years, the first 15 in Portland, the past year in a suburb. The New Yorker in me is still surprised by certain things, especially wildlife in areas I wouldn’t anticipate, the opposite was true.

Living in Manhattan, you never expect to see wildlife in your yard. First off, you don’t have a yard. Second, if you’re willing to call the sidewalk outside your building a yard – maybe there’s a small tree planted by the curb – the animals you see are rats and pigeons. Sure there are dogs and cats but they are on leashes so not exactly “wild” life.

To see real wildlife in your “yard” in New York, the definition of “yard” has to include to include places like Central Park and Riverside Park. There are actual wild turkeys, there are red-tail hawks, there is even the occasional escapee from the Central Park Zoo (r.i.p. Flacco).

And, if all goes well, you might be able to look out to New York Harbor and see something far too large for a home aquarium: whales and dolphins.though, as whales are mammals, you wouldn’t keep one in a home aquarium.

Portland is different. There’s the occasional eagle. You hear coyotes. There are nutria and beavers. I regularly saw seagulls. Seagulls themselves are not necessarily an exotic, you-can’t-believe-what-I-just-saw kind of animal. Still, they are not known as a backyard kind of beast.

I’m sure you’ve heard about Portland getting a lot of rain. That’s certainly true, so much so that for months at a time, you think the Coast Guard – not the police – should patrol the canals. I mean streets.

With that much water, seagulls would show up, convinced there must be fish around my yard somewhere. They were disappointed but kept showing up anyway.

Which bring me to the ducks.

While we no longer live in Portland, we do live in an area that gets just as much rain.

I had a couple of ideas. One, maybe there’s some AAA guide for ducks that said our yard was a nice place to stay, that there was often plenty of water to relax in, plenty of really good grass to munch on.

We don’t do anything special to the grass. The rabbit or rabbits (hard to know how many since they don’t wear name tags) that lives under our porch seems really happy.

The second idea was most likely. The ducks had been flying somewhere and the female just needed a bathroom break or a breather from the two males following her.

I quickly became convinced it was number two. Every now and then the males managed to find their way out from under the bush and approached her. She made it clear that she wasn’t interested, chasing after them, pecking as she did.

There are some feathers still in our yard to support this theory.

Finally, she gave up and made a break for it, flying off, the two males on her tail.

I don’t know where they went or if they’re coming back. In the meantime, if any birds passing by need a place to stay, we have a vacancy.