Duck Soup
Yesterday morning when I got up, I noticed the carcass of a duck in our back yard. Well, what was left of a duck, anyway. I was way too squeamish to go out there and take a close look. It appeared to have been a victim of a fox. We have a lot of ducks hanging out in our back yard, because the green space leads to a little pond. Since the pond melted a few weeks ago, there are dozens of ducks on it. Dozens. Mallards and wood ducks mostly, male and female. One of the local cats, a little fat black one with the prettiest golden eyes you’ve ever seen, stalks the ducks regularly. He even attacks once in a while, but these ducks are easily twice his size, and I’m sure he wasn’t the one who had a duck dinner overnight.
The real problem comes with what to do with a dead duck. Well, what’s left of a dead duck. As I already mentioned, I’m not going out there to pick it up. I thought about asking the HOA to take care of it; after all, they complain when things don’t look “just so” in our yards, so they should be keeping the green space “just so” as well. It’s what they are getting paid for, right?
But there was a Plan B. Or Maybe C. Plan B was leave it there and see if other wildlife would clean it up for me. In Missouri, that “other wildlife” would have been an opossum. But we don’t have those here in Colorado, so I held out hope for a crow, or maybe another fox. Plan C was much more entertaining, and this is the one I employed.
Plan C involved texting the Perfect Child at work and telling her about my gruesome discovery. She loves gruesome. She is at that age. At her age I loved gruesome too. She was, of course, fascinated. When she got home from work, I asked her if I could give her a bag and she could pick it up and bag it up and put it in the trash. She went for her gloves, a pair of pink and black bike gloves that she wears for everything that would require getting her hands dirty. I had not suggested she actually touch the carcass with her hands, gloved or not. Tater, of course, was equally fascinated, and stood on the patio jiggling up and down with excitement. The Perfect Child circled around the bony carcass a few times, her nose wrinkled and a total look of disgust on her face. But she wasn’t backing away, either. She reached as if she was going to pick it up, then cringed away. She looked around her, grabbing a cottonwood stick that had fallen from one of the trees. From this distance, she was able to pick it up – she stretched the stick through the open rib cage of the body and lifted it into the air, where she could then turn it around a bit and get a closer look. Then she dropped it in the bag. Immediately after that, she did her Dance of Disgust. It looks sort of like the Pee Pee Dance, only much more animated and with lots of tossing of the head. The Dance was so intense that she had to drop the bag to finish it.
Once that was done, she picked up the bag and asked if Tater wanted to see it. Of course Tater wanted to see it! She raced out there and her sister held the bag open so she could see. “Oooooh.” They informed me that there was no head, only a tail, both wings, and one leg/foot. That must have been one hungry fox.
The excitement and disgust done away with, the Perfect Child tied the bag closed and unceremoniously dropped it in the trash can. Today, she dragged it back out to show her boyfriend, with great glee. He’s a country boy, so it didn’t bother him any but she was sure proud of it, as if she’d been the one to kill it and eat it. Kids are so funny.
The best news of all? I didn’t have to deal with any of that gruesome cleanup. Thank goodness.
