Real life tales, featuring every day people and every day ducks.
One Saturday afternoon we were all sitting quietly in the lougeroom when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed some movement in the backyard. I looked up to find a duck sitting in our backyard.
"A duck! There's a duck in the backyard!"
We all jumped to our feet, especially the cat, and ran to the kitchen window, as the duck had just moved out of sight.
When we arrived at the window we realised there were two ducks.
"There are two ducks!"
After that a wise suggestion was made that a. we feed the ducks and b. we don't let the cat outside. So, I sat there, holding the cat in my arm and throwing bread to the ducks in my backyard.
Amazingly, our cat wasn't wanting to chase the ducks, he was happy to just sit on my lap and watch them as they waddled, quacked and caught the occasional piece of bread.
They stayed for about 20 minutes and I loved every second of it. Eventually they sort of bobbed their heads up and down, set wide their wings, took a couple of steps and flew up into the sky.
Whilst this site is a bit of a lark and a play on the very silly idea that 'ducks are evil' and do a lot of scheming (in fact this site is an effort to debunk that dubious statement), that day was a wonderful opportunity to sit and watch the ducks quietly. They're beautiful creatures and it's very easy to fall in love with them.
This won't sound real. It happened to me, not a friend of a friend. Anyway...
One day I was standing in alley between two major buildings in the middle of the city. Not near any parks or lakes. I looked up to see two ducks flying (wings barely flapping) straight down the alley towards me. They flew very closely over my head and into the middle of the road behind me. Once into the middle they dipped their left wings in unison and turned and flew effortlessly down the road and away.
A friend remarked that:
"... they were probably doing a strafing run, you know how evil ducks are..."
... but I've had to dismiss that remark out of hand. As we all know, ducks are not evil.
Whilst waiting for a bus one day (near an inner city park), I noticed a parklands duck very close to the footpath. When it saw me it almost seemed to look at me and change its mind about where it wanted to go.
The duck waddled towards the bus stop, had a quick look at me and then flew/jumped onto the top of the bus stop. There it sat watching the traffic and eventually my bus came along. The look on the faces of the busload of passengers is one I'll never forget.
I'm amazed the duck didn't actually try and board the bus. It sure as heck looked like it wanted to...
Do you have a tale to tell? Why not tell it to me and then I can tell it to the world...