Feeding the Ducks

The moment you have children you suddenly become an expert on all the best duck hangouts. There isn’t a patch of water within a five mile radius of your house that hasn’t been evaluated according to the quantity and quality of its ducks.

There are several important factors to consider when choosing your ‘local’.

How busy is it? You don’t want to rock up to a place teeming with other people’s kids. Everyone knows that children unknown to you are horrible. Obviously your kids are perfect and your friends’ kids are pretty cool too but everyone else’s’ kids?  Ugly. Lacking in discipline. Noisy. Boisterous. Best avoided.

Quantity of ducks: You need a good number of ducks to attract the attention of your child who’d probably rather be playing their DS anyway. Too few ducks and you’ve got no hope.

Quality of ducks: Now I never knew that I could suffer from duck snobbery, but let’s face it, Mallards are such old hat. Any decent suburban pond will have a whole collection of beautiful ducks that don’t belong here and are probably wreaking havoc with the local ecosystem.  Much better than boring old mallards.

Depth of pond: Yes I know that little Johnny has ‘an affinity with water’ and has been swimming underwater since birth. And Yes I *have* seen the pictures. Twice. But even so, the risk assessment expert which is lurking in every mum of a child of crawling age or over would be much happier with a pond that is approximately knee deep to a grasshopper.

How hungry the ducks are: Yes, it would seem that ducks can be overfed.  Who’d have thought it?  The first time we took Lyra to feed the ducks we were bitterly disappointed that they turned their noses up at our home baked ciabatta.  Now either they’d have preferred granary rolls, or they were overfed.  Either way, at a few weeks old, Lyra was none too bothered and in all honesty the trip was more a rite of passage for us as parents than it was for her.

I’m very lucky to have a beautiful, not too deep pond full of plentiful hungry foreign ducks just up the road.  Lyra and I visit whenever I can muster the energy to walk a mile uphill (let’s just say it’s not a frequent treat).  When we get there she shows her delight by waving at the ducks excitedly – then eating all the bread.  I’m pretty sure that when she can speak I’ll realise the little tike is just getting their attention so she can taunt them.

That’s my girl!