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Daffy’s Cousin is Messed Up ,,,,,,,,,
forgemonkey
Member Posts: 1,177 ✭✭✭✭
Mallard hen has been setting on a nest, ten feet from the corner of my garage, in residential neighborhood.
I checked the nest when she went to feed/water (???). Eight eggs. Unfortunately this won’t end well with crows in the trees every morning, and house cats/skunks/ possum roaming every night.
Comments
Sadly, nature is indifferent to vicissitudes. And for every story like this, there is a "Martha the cat" vying for our best wishes. Even if one of the eggs survived only long enough to end up on the menu of a Chinese restaurant, it would have known life and had time on the planet. By tomorrow I will likely have forgotten about this mama duck and her situation. And a good thing, too.
Looks like you have dinner and breakfast there.
One of natures magnificent creatures, the mallard. So gentle and so docile looking. Like a chicken in the wild, everyone wants to eat you. Somehow enough survive.
Well it appears she's doing her best. And if her best is what gets her lineage eliminated from the gene pool? Welp. Maybe we end up with a smarter duck pool? I dunno, but a lot of folks think that way.
And fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit
While sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life
And drink it from a fountain
That is pouring like an avalanche
Coming down the mountain
One could argue that is a big problem with the human gene pool; no chlorine and no lifeguards.
I was leaving work the other day and two of the store employees (parking lot cart girls) were standing over a young dove that had apparently fallen out of the nest in an oak tree in the parking lot. It couldn't fly. They were pretty distraught about what to do.
It's nature. Things naturally happen. I walked on by and just left. Don't know what they did.
Mother nature is cruel. Terrible things happen to innocent little animals.
That unfortunate things either naturally or by caprice "happen" is to only state the obvious. It is also not the point. That some people are distressed by such events while others can just walk on by is not a comment about nature, but a comment about the nature of people. Put another way, nature is simply "what is"; empathy and indifference are simply different ways people feel about "what is".
As for nature itself, I think D. H. Lawrence's poem on self-pity is well-stated:
"I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
Found one in a Wyoming canyon decades ago, and relocated the prairie rattlesnake that was about 6 feet away and headed toward her. My good deed for the day.