The Yolk's on Me

We love our ducks.  We enjoy their noisy chatter, and it's fun to watch them waddling around the yard, but most of all we love their eggs.

We call our ducks the Spice Girls.  The chocolate brown one is Cocoa.  The black one is Pepper.  The third has a reddish brown feather wrap around her middle, so we call her Cinnamon.

The Spice Girls are runner ducks.  They don't fly unless they are startled and then they flap their wings like crazy and take bumpy flights a few ungraceful feet in the air. They are inseparable and stick together like glue. 

They skitter around the yard together and are are very social with their sisters who live next door.  I sometimes find the girls gossiping together through the fence.  I would love to know what they are saying to each other.  Perhaps they're trading recipes.

They gobble up their turkey food, and also forage in the yard .We protect our garden from them, and feed them table scraps like cucumber peels and watermelon rinds. They usually run from us, unless we're packing watermelon.

I don't think the Spice Girls like us taking their eggs.  They glare at us when we gather them. They do their best to hide them. We don't have a daddy duck, so their are no babies on the way.  I wonder if they know this. 

Sometimes we cannot find the eggs.  Often we find one or two, but seldom three.  We wonder who the slacker is.  This can go on for days, and then we find a secret nest laden with eggs.  It's like finding buried treasure.  It happens that our treasure is not gold but green, because unlike the goose who laid golden eggs, runner ducks lay green eggs.  I suppose that Doctor Suess knew this.

The hidden eggs are fine in the cool of winter and even early spring, but what will we do when the weather warms up.  We can't have our lovely eggs spoiling under the summer sun. 

The Spice Girls like to bathe in their drinking water, stroll through our sprinklers, and dance in the rain.  We built them a shelter, but they'd rather be outdoors. 

Those green egg shells are hard.  Yesterday when I was making breakfast I couldn't get the shell to crack.  When it finally cracked, the egg spilled out and...the yolk was on me. 

That quacks me up.

Linda Garner