Dear pair of Mallard Ducks,
Thank you for returning to the wetland in our yard this year. I believe it is because of you that I can now sleep at night again. Either you ate all the damn spring peepers or you scared the holy hell out of them, but either way they haven’t been back for over a week. Frankly, I’m hoping you ate them since I wanted them all dead, given they could be heard loudly through closed windows even with a fan and/or white noice machine, but even if you didn’t, I’m grateful.
Please feel free to return every year to eat frogs.
You’re quite welcome. The frogs are quite tasty, and we appreciate the local stoners not gathering them up for a game of Frog Baseball.
However, you should be aware that since this is such an excellent feeding ground, we are also looking at this as an excellent breeding ground. I have a timelined series of sounds I would for you to get used to as a replacement for your spring peeper annoyances:
<cheep! cheep! cheep!>
<cheep! cheep! cheep!>
<cheep! cheep! cheep!>
<quack! quack! quack!>
<quack! quack! quack!>
<quack! quack! quack!>
We hope this does not cause you any inconvenience.
No problem. We’ve raised many ducklings before, and their noise level approaches nothing like the damn peepers. Besides, duckings are very sweet. Feel free to raise the kids here. But raise them to be frog eaters.
You horrible person. You support those hungry, greedy, murderous mallard ducks and what they did to us? You support genocide (or whatever you’d call it)? Cold. You are cold.
My parents, uncles, aunts, my children! And what did we ever do to you? Just a little singing. Just…singing. Sharing our joy. And now my family is dead.
It is with great sorry and abject remorse that I send this missive. We simply never stopped to consider the untold tragedy we were inflicting upon you. We looked at you as a food source, without ever considering that you were a living, thinking, and most importantly, feeling being.
Perhaps you would like to disclose your location so a meeting can be arranged. We would be most pleased to be a part in ending what must be an unspeakable suppering…errr…suffering.
Not really. Two ducks couldn’t have eaten that many frogs, so I suspect that the frogs have merely fleed to the safety of the lake across the street. Or maybe matting season is just over for the year.
We think these two ducks might really be ours though. We had ducks for several years and still had several ducks when we moved here, but all by the mother duck was killed by a fishercat Who knew ducks would fare better in the city?! We only lost one - stolen- in the 2.5 years we lived in Taunton MA, but lost all seven half-grown ducklings over a couple of nights during the first two months after we moved to NH again. Freakin’ fishercat got them through their fencing. It was messy… :eek: Those poor things…they were half Domestic Mallard, half Black Cayuga , so they were simply gorgeous- Dad’s basic coloring with mom’s facial stripes. ::sniff, sniff:: After the massacre she was a sad lonely critter.
Ducks are not solitary animals, so my parents bought her a companion…and they both flew away a couple of days later. Two ducks end up in the wetland every spring, and they’re not afraid of us, so it’s possible it’s them. Especially since Malards can live 12 years and they were only two or three when they took off six years ago.
A few years back, I lived in a townhouse in suburbia. There was a pond in the complex, complete with duck family. One hot August day I came home to find that one of the ducklings was trundling along, happy as could be, in the mist from the sprinkler hose that was stretched through the grass along the curb. Cute little fella.
Who knew ducks would fare better in the city?! We only lost one - stolen- in the 2.5 years we lived in Taunton MA, but lost all seven half-grown ducklings over a couple of nights during the first two months after we moved to NH again. Freakin’ fishercat got them through their fencing. It was messy… :eek: Those poor things…they were half Domestic Mallard, half 