Duck Days in Davis

On my way home from work tonight along the Arboretum, a fat and slightly dingy Norway rat ran in front of my bicycle wheel. I often see them around but I can never quite get used to it. They are superb swimmers, highly adaptable, and they have an inexhaustible supply of food from the well-meaning duck-feeders. They are here to stay.

The duck-feeders fall into three basic types: most common are families with young children who come to the lake at the Arb, sit on the very well-fertilized grass, and toss bags and bags of bread to the ducks, mostly mallards with every possible intergrade hybridity imaginable (an untidy bunch). Second are the sporadic “dotties”—folks, normally older, who talk to themselves as often as the ducks, and are mostly tolerated as benign, not-quite-there, members of supervised-care facilities.

The third type is the most frightening. I’ll call her Guerrilla Girl. She rides her bike up and down the length of the Arboretum daily with a black carrier sack full of grain, which she deposits in strategic locations where “her” ducks know her and fight over themselves to start gobbling before the rats can get to it (a futile gesture, of course). Her eyes are glassy and her jaw is set in a square grimace, a defiant warning to the world not to jeopardize her Right To Feed the Ducks. She reminds me of early 1970s Trotskyites or Roger Clemens—the expressions are identical.

I did make the mistake once of gently pointing out to Guerrilla Girl that she was feeding the rats more than the ducks; that the ducks had plenty of food anyway; that their overpopulation in this artificial oxbow lake was raising the fecal coliform count to lethal levels; that they were becoming vectors of all kinds of disease which they would pass along to other ducks (not to mention other birds). I was told in among the tirade of invective that the University could only get rid of the rats by poisoning them, and that she knew these ducks, she followed their movements throughout the seasons, and that they had their own patterns (I could hardly disagree with this: they start drooling when they see Guerrilla Girl’s black bag from half a mile away). She nearly killed us last week by squealing her bike dementedly into a right-angle so we wouldn’t hit a heavily gravid female that was heading down to the water.

I’ve never, unlike bsag, been mugged by a duck, so I don’t feel a personal hostility toward these avian misfits. In fact, I’m kind of impressed they’ve managed to win such an ardent champion to their cause. Laughing all the way to their holes are the rats, who emerge at dusk to reap the rewards of this crusade.