Enslaved by Ducks

by Tarte, Bob

  When Stanley Sue wasn’t scaling drawer handles, she stalked the tops of the bunny cages, hoping for a clear shot at pecking Bertie or Rollo through the bars. But the dining room woodwork was more at risk than the rabbits. Her love of chewing compelled me to slide a knee-high plywood board between the backs of the bunny cages and the picture window, hoping it would keep her from reaching the windowsill.

  But Stanley’s routine destruction of household objects wasn’t so easily derailed. Seated on the edge of the board, she would gnaw a section of plywood until she had eaten away an access to the presumably sweeter material of the sill. Back before compact discs had completely phased out LPs, I regularly received albums in the mail to review for my magazine column. Folding their cardboard mailers into various shapes, I wedged them between the cages and plywood board and between the plywood board and the window as a further distraction from her intractable beavering of the woodwork. These also became grist for the mill. If we waited too long to clean up after her, I might fill two kitchen trashbags with Stanley-generated wood shavings and shredded cardboard that she had deposited in a small space between Bertie’s cage and a well-chewed cabinet that held a radio with a dangerously chewed cord.

  Despite her bad habits, Stanley Sue’s intelligence and good nature kept me from staying angry with her for long. In the morning she would dog my feet in the kitchen, scuttling across the linoleum as I retrieved dry kibbles from the cupboard and canned cat food from the fridge to dump into dishes on the countertop. Fearing I was bent on returning her to her cage, she would balk if I attempted to pick her up. As long as I assured her I simply wanted to take her “upstairs to see kitty,” she eagerly hopped onto my hand and rode along. For a few weeks she even seemed poised to learn to “poop” on cue if I said that magic word while holding her above Penny’s litter box, but my timing was frequently as poor as hers, and I gave up on it.

  She shocked me one Sunday at breakfast when I told her, “Better get on top of your cage if you want your juice.” She trotted across the floor, clambered up her cage, and voiced the excited chuck note that meant she expected a treat. On a whim I once corrected her, “Not on your cage, in your cage.” She paused inches from the cage top, turned around, and ducked inside. I soon realized that she understood far more than she preferred to let on, obeying most commands only if they resulted in a reward or avoided an unwanted confrontation.

  Stanley Sue formed mental connections that seemed to illustrate she was capable of abstract thought. My first inkling of this came when she mocked me with a kissing sound when I lavished praise on another pet. She demonstrated a similar leap in logic after mastering an obnoxiously accurate imitation of our squeaky ovenbroiler door and erupting with the sound as soon as Linda’s fingers touched the broiler-door handle. Once she lost interest in this stunt, she started making the same squeak when we opened the door to the basement. Her linkage of two completely different-looking but functionally similar objects implied that she understood the concept of a door.

  Along with the blossoming of Stanley Sue’s personality came a deepening bond between us. During dinner, once I had stopped feeding her long enough to try to eat from my own plate, she often left her cage top to climb the horizontal crosspieces of my chair legs and park herself under my seat. Reaching down to tweak her beak, I no longer feared a bite, at least no more often than the owner of an exuberant cat would fear a nip. If she didn’t want to be touched, she turned her head away. If I insisted on picking her up when she was adamantly opposed to it, on rare occasions she would strike me with her beak rather than bite. The solution was respecting her dignity and asking her to do on her own what she would not do with my help. So, if she was happily employed reaching through the bars of Rollo’s cage struggling to overturn his water dish, and profoundly resented stepping onto my hand to go back to her cage, I didn’t press the matter. Instead I would tell her, “If you won’t step up, you have to go into your cage on your own,” and bribe her with juice if she still resisted. She would invariably comply. While my approach flew in the face of parrot behavioralists who stress that the “step up” command must be obeyed at all times, the end result was what mattered to me.

  Stanley Sue’s affection toward me was tempered by her jealousy of other birds. Even if she was occupied with an ambitious woodwork-improvement project, I only had to float a few sweet syllables toward Howard the ring-necked dove to drive her to a fast march across the floor, a climb up the side of her cage, and Quasimodo-like activity with her bell. But Stanley Sue’s eyes turned greenest whenever I paid attention to Ollie, who enjoyed chirping, whistling, and chattering in response to a happy tone of voice. He especially savored the cryptic phrase, “Can you say?” which was a holdover from my early attempts to teach him to talk. “Can you say, ‘Pretty boy’?” I would ask him, back in the days before our menagerie exploded. “Can you say, ‘I’m a bitey little bird’?” While few English words ever entered his vocabulary, asking him, “Can you say?” always elicited delighted peals, which infuriated Stanley Sue, who would squawk and flap her wings as if she were going to swoop down upon the interloper. She only acted out her jealousy if I was sitting on a chair scratching her head as Linda concluded the ritual of the “night-night hat” by presenting Ollie to me with the request, “Say goodnight to Poppy.” If my goodnight lasted longer than a couple of clipped words, Stanley Sue would pinch my leg with her beak.

  We never got used to Ollie’s squawking fits. Repetition made them harder rather than easier to bear. “I am not going to have you ruin every single meal,” Linda would fume, hopping up from her chair to spoon corn or peas into his dish. He’d coo and eat contentedly as she stood over him.

  “If you’re not good, you’re going to finish your dinner in the bathroom,” I’d threaten when the squawking started again. A green bean or bit of flavored gelatin usually bought us a few moments of peace.

  Fortunately, his worst tirades were confined to mealtime. The din of canary songs, dove hoots, parrot whistles, and parakeet chirps throughout the day distracted him from constantly screaming for attention. The parakeets had succeeded in wearing down his bad attitude by using the top of his cage as a gossiping spot and then effortlessly scattering whenever he approached. He grew especially tolerant of Rossy, who spurned the affections of lovestruck Reggie in favor of perching on Ollie’s cage and admiring him just out of beak-striking range.

  If I placed Ollie on my shoulder, Rossy and Reggie would join him instantly. A few moments later the shy Sophie would land behind my neck—along with Elliott, the brown and white canary we had bought after Chester’s unexpected death the same day we had lost Peggy to the raccoon. A competitive Howard would top the others by settling on my head, dashing my hopes of ever finding employment as a scarecrow.

  HOWARD CONTINUED COURTING the parakeets with such misplaced ardor that when the opportunity arose to take in two homeless female doves, we decided to provide him with a harem of his own species. The snowy white turtledoves came to us as Jacob Lestermeyer’s feud with his pharisee neighbor boiled over to include the Allegan County sheriff’s department, the humane society, and a circuit-court judge. It started with the pharisee’s indignant phone call to the sheriff’s department when a gang of Lestermeyer’s chickens scratched up his meticulously manicured backyard in search of an insect meal, then whitewashed his pristine brick patio for dessert. By the time the animal control officers arrived, a trio of uncontrollable goats was munching on the pharisee’s shrubbery—possibly including a one-eared, scarf-wearing ringleader, but I’m speculating here.

  “This kind of thing goes on day after day,” the pharisee complained to the uniformed animal specialists, possibly with a good deal of arm-waving. (More speculation here.) “Somebody had better take a good long look at what’s going on next door,” the pharisee demanded, as he pointed toward the petting zoo/butcher shop.

  The sheriff’s department did take a look at it, and with the assistance of the humane society, determined that Lestermeye
r’s animals suffered from overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. We had noticed nothing of the kind when we visited his farm the previous year, but that may speak more to the way Linda and I lived than to Allegan County health standards. A judge gave Lestermeyer exactly thirty days to pare down his population of ducks, geese, chickens, pheasants, turkeys, goats, cows, ponies, horses, guinea fowl, donkeys, doves, and mythological visions to exactly one hundred edible and inedible residents.

  True to his irascible nature, Jacob defied the court order up until a hair’s breadth of the deadline. Linda’s friend LuAnne was donating time and money to a farm that took in unwanted and abused animals, and she managed to convince Lestermeyer to part with the prescribed number of beasts, to be housed at the farm sanctuary. Her fear was that if the county shut him down entirely, none of the critters might find proper homes. The same man who had refused my extra two dollars and Linda’s donation for feed insisted that LuAnne pay him three hundred dollars for the animals she was helping to relocate. He refused to part with larger livestock that might fetch earnings as steaks and cutlets, which at least made LuAnne’s transportation problems easier. Two doves with insufficient meat on their bones thus found their way to our dining room. Howard’s bliss was sure to follow. Or so we assumed.

  We had no doubt that the new doves were females. They both proved their fecundity within days by laying lovely white eggs in the pot of a hanging Boston fern and depositing others at random in the bottom of their cage. The newcomers were a bachelor dove’s dream come true. In contrast to Howard’s raucous hoots, the girls cooed a softer, seductive song that all but demanded our horny ringneck come hither. They flaunted their beauty in every region of the room, spreading their wings on a scalloped chair back or strolling a placemat on the table, ostensibly in search of crumbs but in actuality trolling for a husband. What was poor Howard to do but submit to their womanly wiles?

  “What the heck?” I asked Linda. “You’d think he’d be going crazy chasing them.”

  Instead of wooing the heavenly sisters, Howard continued making his normal rounds courting and harassing the parakeets and indulging in episodes of beak-twiddling passion with Reggie. The only interaction among our fawn-colored clown and the pale newcomers came whenever one of the sisters usurped his favorite perching place on top of the parakeets’ cage. Rather than swoop down on the interloper with a masculine flourish that could be interpreted as a prelude to conquest, Howard would hop clumsily to the parakeets’ cage top, driving off the female with ungentlemanly pecks.

  If Linda and I had fallen in love with the doves, we would have given this budding romance the years it needed to unfold. A couple of factors hardened our hearts against the matchmaking. Pigeons, and to a lesser extent doves, have the deserved reputation as besmirchers of statues, park benches, vinyl siding, and windows. Howard was hygienic compared to his outdoor siblings, leaving discreet and easily-picked-up calling cards behind him. Without sinking to the level of giving details that might disturb a yogurt-eating reader, it must be said that the newcomers’ droppings were not only plentiful, but they also possessed a sloppy quality that required an endless supply of paper towels. The girls were the miniature equivalents of geese. Added to this was their increasing pugnacity toward our smaller birds. Before long we decided that they should seek residence elsewhere, with Linda acting as their real estate agent.

  AFTER LINDA HAD placed the classified ad “two doves free to a good home” in the local weekly shopping newspaper, I braced myself for the same onslaught of erroneous calls that had followed our request for a handyman. To my surprise, nobody phoned to ask about diving boards, Dove ice-cream bars, or the benefits our business offered. A dove fancier willing to drive the fifty miles from Hastings came to our rescue instead. Jonathan turned out to be a breeder who raised and hand-tamed a number of his birds for professional magicians to use in their acts.

  “Magicians treat their doves very well,” he assured us. Nevertheless, he promised not to sell the sisters but to introduce them to gallant males eager to encourage the laying of fertile eggs. Our pair was already too old to make good show birds, anyway, he explained.

  “You have to start working with them almost as soon as they hatch if you want to win their trust,” he told us.

  “Just like call duck ducklings,” I muttered.

  Jonathan carried himself with a vibrant confidence that confirmed his claim to be an amateur magician himself. I could imagine his dark brown hair combed and styled to complement a tuxedo with sequined lapels, while his cleanly shaved upper lip cried out for the requisite neatly trimmed mustache. It all fit perfectly, and for all I knew, a cape packed with colored-silk handkerchiefs, tricky decks of cards, and collapsible bouquets huddled mysteriously in the back of his station wagon.

  “Who’s this guy?” he asked, as he gravitated toward Howard’s cage. “You’re not thinking of getting rid of him, are you?”

  “Always thinking,” I told him. Linda shot me a look. “But, no, we certainly couldn’t deprive ourselves of Howard.”

  “He’s a very handsome male.”

  “How can you tell that he’s a he?” Linda wondered. “Sometimes he’s not even sure what he is,” and she went on to relate the embarrassing tale of Howard’s sexual exploits.

  Jonathan explained that male doves possess an apparently wider iris than the females. He held one of the girls close to Howard’s cage as proof. Try as I might, I couldn’t distinguish any relative difference between the colored portions of their eyes, and no other dove authority has subsequently backed up Jonathan’s method for identifying dove gender—which might actually have relied upon an inter-species mind-reading stunt. Leaving us his phone number, the magician’s breeder put the pair of females in a cardboard carrier, stepped into his car, and disappeared in a puff of smoke that indicated he needed exhaust-system work.

  I HAD BARELY gotten used to the two doves, when suddenly they were gone. And that loss was negated by our gain of a roughneck Muscovy duck. The day that Linda brought Hector home began pretty much like any other Sunday. After breakfast, I replenished the drinking water, pool water, and scratch feed for the geese and female ducks, let them forage in the yard awhile, then carbon-copied with the male Khaki Campbells. Agnes was rolling around on the cement back deck, so I petted her while Liza and Hailey hogged the pool and the three girl ducks looked on enviously. By the time I had wrapped up my outdoor chores, Linda was finishing braiding her hair in preparation for church in nearby Ionia. The church boasted a full sixteen members, including the pastor’s family.

  “’Bye, sweetie, I’m leaving now,” she told me, planting a kiss on my lips and slinging her purse over her shoulder. Less than thirty seconds later, she trotted back into the house to retrieve her back cushion. “’Bye, sweetie, I’m going,” she called, as she darted out the door. I was still struggling to separate the bulky Grand Rapids Press Sunday newspaper advertising supplements from their thin news and editorial wrappers when she returned to hurriedly heat up her therapeutic gelatin pack in the microwave. Years of pushing a vacuum cleaner, not to mention other strenuous work throughout her life, had left Linda with a pain in her lower back that marriage to me occasionally sent southward but did nothing to alleviate.

  “’Bye, I’m late,” she announced.

  “See you in ten seconds,” I said.

  “No you won’t.” She laughed as she darted outside. Edging forward on the couch, I watched as she pulled her car toward the road, jerked it to a halt inches before its wheels hit the shoulder, flung herself out the car door and to her feet, and made a fresh assault on the house. Punctuating each door-slamming departure and reentry was a pair of baseball-size jingle bells that Linda had tied to the doorknob a couple of Christmases ago and decided to keep in place as an all-season annoyance. The thud of wood against the hoarse rattle of metal had jolted me from many a nap with nightmarish visions of plummeting headlong into a medieval forge.

  Jingle! “Forgot my church collection money,” s
he explained, as I pondered a perplexing installment of The Family Circus comic strip. “Bye-bye.” Jingle!

  Jingle! “I need my Bible.” She grabbed it from a wicker basket perched on one of my hi-fi speakers, almost sending the basket and ten pounds of clutter crashing to the floor. “See you.” Jingle!

  Jingle! “Have you seen Grapey?”

  “I don’t keep track of your hats.”

  The errant stocking cap was exactly where it belonged, on the top tier of the coat rack next to the “night-night hat.”

  “That everything?” I asked.

  “Drink of water.” She thundered into the bathroom and out again. “’Bye!” Jingle!

  Jingle! “Don’t forget, I’m going to try to talk that farmer into giving us that duck.”

  “Jeez.” Jingle!

  I had forgotten all about the duck. Ceasing to purchase new animals no longer saved us from acquiring new animals. Without warning, we had slid across an unmarked border into the territory of animal rescuers. It was a realm that demanded a high state of alertness lest we join a group that thought nothing of devoting every waking moment, dollar of income, and square inch of property to caring for the unstoppable tide of unwanted pets. As pet owners, we were way over the edge of excess with our bird, cat, and rabbit menagerie. I couldn’t see myself joining the ranks of animal rescuers without descending into a bottomless hell of crabbiness. But I did find myself agreeing to take in animals, especially when their lot in life was as pitiful as Hector’s.