About Forests & People -- Intermission

My Top Ten Wildlife Experiences, # 4

Ducks and Fox

A spring Saturday morning about 1966

The four-thousand acre lake was only a couple miles from our house at the ranger station.  My Grumman canoe was rather new.  On Saturday mornings I would get up before any light, prepare a bottle for Chad, put in his crib where he could find it so Lois could sleep a little longer and drive our 1963 Volvo, 122S (Brownie), with canoe on top, to Heaton Bay on Lake Dillon.  If my timing was good, I would be slipping the canoe into the water when there was just enough light to see.

The idea was to be on the lake, in this little bay, just as first light comes streaming between 14,000 foot Grays and Tory peaks on the Continental Divide, skips across the open water and slams into the Tenmile Range standing tall and thinking it could hold back the sun.   Peaks One and Two turn red in the first moments of their effort against those sun rays.

My excuse to the world for being there was to fly fish (in my entire life I have only had ten minutes of good fishing), but the truth is, I just wanted to see and feel the wild early morning.

On this morning, after the sun had put on its show, I was paddling slow and quiet in the shallows, rounding a small spit, when I noticed a mother duck with six or eight babies.  She paid no attention to me, she was alarmed about something else.  The mother was working very hard verbally and physically to get her ducklings in a line and move them further from shore.  She was having a frustrating time of it.  I was seeing all of this without her apparently noticing me.  

After a few minutes watching, I saw the fox!  It was in tall grass no more than six feet from the ducks.  The mother duck was, at once, swimming between the fox and her brood and herding the ducklings further from shore into open water,  I could only imagine the alarm in her small brain as I watched this drama playing out.

The fox would come out of the tall grass, take a step or two into the water ~ mother duck screaming ~ fox backs out of the water and shakes its front paws and disappears; then reappears from another patch of tall grass at a different angle.  

All the time the mother duck is working to convince her threatened brood that there is great danger and they must follow her.

Finally, after four or five minutes the mother duck’s life and death efforts worked and the little brood moved away from shore in a disciplined line.  

The fox disappeared back into the tall grass, probably to settle for a mouse breakfast.

I guess the mother duck taught me that discipline is the best defense when faced with danger.

I paddled on ~~ what a way to start a day!

Jerry Covault