Farm proves to be the place where wild things are
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Today we introduce a monthly column by Ben James, co-owner of Town Farm in Northampton. His essays on farm life will appear the last Saturday of the month in this space.
NORTHAMPTON - We got 10 ducklings at first, day-olds that came in the mail last spring, and when those got killed by a dog or a fox or who knows what (it was a coyote, my then-3-year-old son insisted repeatedly, a look of wild exhilaration in his eyes) we got some more. In the summer, we slaughtered half of them for meat and kept the rest - runner ducks and one Rouen - a flock of the most neurotic, spastic, downright antisocial animals we've ever raised. We had a little pond that turned a polleny yellowish-green and finally dried up in the fall, but we kept the birds through the winter, averaging zero to three dirty eggs per day, most of which froze and cracked before we ever got to them.
But that's last year's story. If Oona or I mentioned the ducks this spring, it was mostly to discuss how to get rid of them - Craigslist, slaughter, pawning them off to a friend (Hey Jesse, if you're reading this ... ). Then two of them went missing, then three, but one came back, and sometimes they were all back, usually at night when the grain came out. And not an egg to speak of anywhere. Finally I realized there was brooding going on, these girls were egg-sitting, but I had no idea where. We were working hard as we could to grow some vegetables so I wasn't thinking much about ducks, just that nagging feeling that all my eggs were out there somewhere and I didn't know where.
Meanwhile we got our broiler chickens (the meatbirds, we call them) and several turkeys, a whole mess of baby fowl kicking up dust and grain in a wooden box in the workshop. And I go in there early one morning only to see this chick-like thing scuttle across the floor - a turkey poult I think, but I count them and they're all there. I look under the welder and I think I know what it is, but not until I get really close can I be sure that it's a newly hatched duckling.
Of course I thought immediately of our wayward brooding ducks, but the thing was, this was not a runner duck, not a Rouen, not a farm duck at all. The stripe on the face, the slight hook to the bill - this was a creature from the other side of domesticity, even at a day old you could tell she was wild (she must have been lured into the shop the previous afternoon by the cheeping of chicks and poults). Now she was given her own room in the Town Farm Hotel and Orphanage, but she was alone and sad, and she did not seem interested in the starter-grain that her overbred cousins thrive on.
Only after she died a couple days later did we employ Google to discover that she was a merganser. If she'd grown up, she would have had a hairdo better than any your mother or sister or weird aunt had back in the '50s or '60s. Look them up, I swear. The coolest birds. So that was the merganser, and if you ever want to talk about death for three straight hours on a Saturday morning, get yourself a sad, starved duckling and a 4-year-old boy and you'll do just fine.
Then, that very afternoon, our friends came over and saw a whole squad of newly hatched ducklings scrambling off behind the barn. At least a dozen, Rowen said. I showed her a photo of the merganser, but these ducklings were different. I went out to find them. Now picture your neighborhood farmer walking through poison ivy and marsh grass quacking like a duck to try and lure out some yellow-spotted babies. But why? What did I need? More ducks?
No luck. I didn't find them.
A while later, on my way to the Y, our neighbor Claudia hollered me off my bike to come tell her what she should do with the ducklings she'd found crossing Montview Avenue. Four of them and one lost under the hedge. She'd been half-desperate, trying to catch them for over an hour. A friend had driven off to get mealy worms from the pet store. "I think they're mine," I said, but the whole time I was looking at them in the plastic crate, thinking, Are they? These guys looked pretty wild, too. Claudia seemed relieved, but in my mind I was trying to get out of it, like an overextended father trying to deny paternity. They look nothing like my ducklings, and I have pictures from last year to prove it. "Do you want them?" I asked, but Claudia respectfully declined.
I brought them home that night. We put Silas to bed. The baby (the human one - 6 months old) sweated and squirmed on the kitchen floor while Oona and I held one of the ducklings up to the image on the laptop, trying to identify it. Could have been a Rouen, could have been a wild mallard, there was no way to be sure.
It was right around then that we looked at one another - a split second - and started to laugh very hard. The tiredness, our crew to manage Monday morning, the ground to be tilled, the spinach harvested, the melons planted and here on the floor next to the squealing baby, another orphan duckling, trying to fly with its little Q-tip wings.
We warned Silas that they might die, and the next day - despite the grass and bugs we fed them - that's exactly what two of them did. After dark, I put the other two out in the weeds, not so much because I thought they had any hope of surviving, I just figured there was something a-prowl that would appreciate a quality snack. I haven't seen a duckling - wild or domestic - since, but the laying hens continue to make their usual rounds, and the meatbirds are growing by the hour. The goat kids keep squeezing through the gate to demand their bottles of milk, and the runner ducks are around here somewhere, complaining. Those ducks. If they get eaten by coyotes I'll feel guilty, but that's about as much as I can say. I do keep an eye out for their eggs. I can't help it. And tomorrow I'll print a photo of the merganser to put on our fridge, to remind us of the small wild things that surround this farm, that have nothing to do with the work we think is so important most of the time.
Ben James runs Town Farm in Northampton with his wife, Oona Coy. To learn more about the farm, visit them at the Tuesday Market in downtown Northampton or check out nohotownfarm.com.
