I’m all for devoted mothers but this teetered at the ridiculous line.
We live on a hobby farm and at one time had a brace of Moscovy ducks. I had to look this up but did you know that a group of ducks can be called a brace, badelynge, bunch or a flock?
While we’re discussing names, a male duck is a drake and a female duck is a …. duck.
That seems wrong, somehow. Not only are the females blessed with the job of keeping the eggs warm for a month while staring at the blank wall of a barn, but they don’t even get a special name.
Brace yourself for this story about a duck badelynge which resulted in a bunch of ducklings added to our flock.
Phew. Couldn’t resist but I promise I’m done with those names now.
Probably.
But the great thing about our ducks was that they were wonderful mothers. Springtime would bring us several mother ducks leading a line of fuzzy yellow babies, a la Make Way for Ducklings.
One day we stumbled onto a nest of eggs. Maybe this was a whole brace of eggs. I’m not sure. We couldn’t count them all.
With two ducks sitting on them.
We guessed the two ducks had started nests close together and the eggs had merged into one gigantic nest. Yeah, weird.
So the mothers sat on their eggs together. At least they had someone to talk to while waiting the coming ducklings.
Twenty-one ducklings hatched.
But there aren’t DNA tests for ducklings (well, not on our farm for sure) and we had two ducks with all these babies. Who belonged to whom?
It didn’t turn out to be a problem. The two mothers led the way with a long winding line of yellow fuzzy ducklings waddling behind. A long line.
We had added more than a bunch to our duck flock. We’d collected a whole badelynge.
Don’t you think those mamas deserved a more amazing name than duck?
