In Tribute to a Duck
There are those who think pet cemeteries are considerably worse than absurd, and in a way, of course, they’re right. What extravagance.
On the other hand, I had a cat who was a genuine friend for 11 years, and dammit, we talked to one another. After he died, I buried him in the back yard, not a cemetery, but I now understand how a person fond of an animal can do things that seem eccentric to outsiders.
What captured Maggie Peyrot’s fancy was a pair of mallards, the common park-variety ducks whose males have a green head and whose females are speckled brown.
Ducks are particularly endearing; they are so clumsy everything they do is funny. They walk funny, they fly funny, they make funny sounds. Just look at a duck; it’s funny looking. Even the name is funny. Say it 10 times and see.
It makes you want to do something to help these cute, seemingly incompetent creatures make it through life, and you wind up feeding them. The impulse is irresistible.
So four springs ago after a pair landed in the huge reflecting pond outside the Park Newport Apartments rental office, Peyrot, who works there, began feeding them. She quickly became attached to them.
Others did, too. Park Newport, which is beside Upper Newport Bay, has 1,306 apartments and an estimated population of 2,000. That makes it as big as perhaps a thousand American cities and towns. The ducks were there every day, and soon they had become the town ducks.
They spent their time hopping from one to another of the seven swimming pools and accepting handouts. After several weeks of this soft living, the ducks disappeared, apparently gone to greener waters.
The following March, Peyrot came to work to find the ducks had returned to the pond. Again they left, then again returned the following March, and Peyrot began to count on their regular arrival.
“I mean, then you knew everything was going to start; spring is here. It was a big event,” she said.
Could these really be the same ducks each year?
“They are, “ Peyrot insisted. “Why would two ducks come back here every year at the same time? It just makes sense they’re the same ones. There are lots of ducks down in the bay, but these are the only ones that come back.”
When they came back this March, Peyrot began writing an account of their arrivals, which she titled “When the Ducks Come Back to Park Newport.” It begins:
It usually takes some time to start a legend, but if several years creates the beginning of one, we may have a rival for the swallows to Capistrano right here in Newport Beach.
She took photographs of the ducks. Even though the security officers forbade feeding them, she sneaked food to them now and then.
(“I teased the girls because I didn’t want them to feed them,” said Chuck Hollis, the chief of security. “Ducks are cute, but you know what they leave everywhere. But they really were no problem.”)
Peyrot said she was edging toward organizing an actual Duck Day or something of the sort. “It hadn’t gotten quite that far. We were working up to that when this tragedy occurred.”
Lee Anne Fuller, who works in the apartment administration office upstairs, saw it happen Wednesday of last week. She said the hen struggled out of the reflecting pond and waddled across the lawn toward the apartment’s main thoroughfare.
“As we’re watching her she walks right between two cars, walks out onto the street, and this Corvette just comes right by and kills her,” Fuller said. “She was that close to making it. Oh, it was awful!
“Then the animal control officer came to take the duck, and the male was watching. He just stayed there on the grass just waiting for her to come back. And then when we left that night he was still there waiting for her. And ever since then he’s been out here just mooning. It’s awful.”
Peyrot said that someone went to the bay and picked up a hen for the distraught drake, but she soon abandoned him. Someone took the drake to the bay in hopes he’d meet a hen he liked, but he returned to the reflecting pond alone.
Now he wanders around the apartment complex, occasionally waddling up to office and store windows and craning his neck to look inside. “It’s like he’s looking for her,” Peyrot said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. He looks like he’s dying of a broken heart.”
Peyrot has stopped writing and doesn’t care whether I mail her draft back to her. She said it took a while before she even wanted to pick up the ducks’ picture from the photofinisher.
We could consult an expert to find out whether there is any chance these are the same ducks year after year, whether they mate for longer than the breeding season, whether they ever even leave this temperate territory. But those questions don’t really matter.
What matters is that such trivial tragedies are common, and they touch people--sometimes very deeply. This one touched Maggie Peyrot, who is in a state of genuine mourning.
“It just seemed to me because they were so compatible and they had such a good time together that they were a little different than a lot of people are in this area, you know?
“They were together, which a lot of people aren’t.”
