PET OF THE MONTH

FROM MAY 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

The Ducklings

In the two and a half years I've written about animals for the West End Phoenix, I’ve had a donkey lick my boot, met a pig the size of a hatchback hiding out in a downtown backyard shed and witnessed a snake murder a live rat. I’ve fallen for a turtle – a turtle! – after spending an hour in his slow, almost holy world; despite a terrible cold, felt pure exhilaration at the hop of a very large, soft rabbit in a crowded apartment; and met a man, a survivor of devastation and his equally resilient dog, in a patch of eye-high weeds behind an apartment while the sun shone through, and for a jewel-like moment felt scalded by an almost supernatural intensity of life. I’ve petted, fed, watered, held, and stared into the eyes of reptiles, birds and an insect, and dangled limbs in front of countless mammals. And the one thing that is truly radical about writing this column is how simple it is: You spend time in a creature’s presence and you cannot help but have the empathy and insight of what feels like an almost shamanistic trance.

Which brings me to Bo and Cubester.

Because of COVID-19 sheltering-in-place restrictions, I did not feel the downy-soft fuzz of the seven-day-old duckling siblings, or watch their staccato waddle, or smell their copious and malodorous excrement. I couldn’t get even the most remote sense of their tiny souls because I Zoomed them, which is to say, I Zoomed with their owners, Val, Chris, Garnett and June, who told me through my computer screen what it was like to hold them in a box for two hours in the backseat, driving home from Critter Visits, the farm near Bobcaygeon that sets up fostering ($165 for two ducklings, which includes feed, bedding and a manual. Critter Visits has a longstanding foster program that is seeing record applications for quarantine companions during these contact-starved times.) How each of the seven days they’ve had them, they’ve grown before their eyes. How each night the ducklings sleep in a plastic bin in the basement, which is Jackson Pollocked in guano by morning. And how they dive for peas in the bathtub, and exuberantly chase 12-year-old twins Garnett and June around the house, chirping and crapping on every single inch of flooring. (One week in, Bo and Cubester’s foster family have begun heavily Googling DIY duck diaper tutorials on YouTube.) And how it is pure joy in these dark times to hear the invitation in their small throats and see how the ducklings are sprouting tiny neck feathers and nestling into one another as though they are one organism. Val says that holding them close to her neck as they burrow in releases the same endorphins she felt holding her children when they were babies. Time slows, and the only thing that is felt is a dreamlike wave of love. Forget digital, forget six feet.

In another two weeks they will have turned into teenage ducks, which is a lot closer to the large birds they will become (“big,” “loud” and “smelly,” according to the farm’s website), which is when most foster families make the drive back to the farm so their charges can egg-lay or bug-eat, though some are eventually sold to private clients, and could end up as a “delicious meal.”

It’s been months of living through screens, getting impressions of experiences, and we continue to deliberate about what we would have done without animals in quarantine, and it’s true, their value and utility are impossible to measure. But the very thing animals give us, this link to another world that borders on our own, is something that remains impossible to transmit digitally. We observe animals, but they observe us, too. They are not our subordinates. So when the encounter occurs through a laptop, and because we exist in a wordless place with them, essential information is lost. It’s like being in a tent cooped up in a thunderstorm and counting the seconds between lightning flashes, only never getting to see one. What I can see, though, ducklings burrowed into each other sleeping as their foster family speaks, is how in seven short days, in the wobbly-faith time of plague when it is so hard to think outside your thoughts, these creatures have already cast a soft, radiant spell.