The One Where I Interrupt Duck Mating Rituals

 

A few years ago, I wrote about the crazy geese in Boise during nesting season. But have you ever witnessed a duck mating ritual? It's horrifying. 

 

 

Male ducks practice something called "forced copulation," which is exactly what it sounds like. This article on duck mating cautions against "applying human moral standards to animals" and states (correctly) that "for us humans, it can be hard to watch." 

It is. Male ducks will often gang up on one female. They pin her down by biting her neck, sometimes drawing blood. They chase her because she just as aggressively tries to get away. Sometimes the female drowns if the male duck tries to mate her in the water.

I confess, that on several occasions, I have interfered with the circle of life by halting this process and running the male ducks off. 

 

"Leave her alone!" I will yell, clapping my hands toward the ducks. "She doesn't want you!"

 

"Becky, you can't do that," Dan said to me one evening while I reacted to this phenomenon.

 

"But the males ducks rape the females!" I said. 

"You're going against nature."

 

"I'm saving them."

 

Yes, I know I'm anthropomorphizing these mallards, but I don’t like seeing violence against females anywhere, including the animal kingdom.

 

 

 

One morning after a jog, I was stretching out in our neighborhood park, and I heard a young girl behind me yelling, "Stop that! Stop! Now!"  

 

She was going after a group of about three mallards trying to pin a female by mounting her and biting the back of her neck.
 

This is a girl after my own heart, I thought. 

 

I joined her, and we yelled at the mallards until they left the female alone. 

 

"I don't like it when they do that either," I told the girl. "I always try to chase them off."

 

By this time, another girl, her sister, had joined us.

 

“That's Big Mama,” she said. 

 

"You've named the ducks?" I asked, thinking, Thank goodness I'm not the only who projects human traits onto animals.

 

"See her wing? She is injured," the first girl explained. "That's why Big Mama can't fly away when they do that."

 

"That's awful," I said.

"Did you know there is a spider that eats her mate after she has babies?" the sister asked me.

Apparently, these girls were very aware of the presence of brutality in the animal kingdom.

 

"Are you talking about the black widow?" I asked.
 

"Yeah. Do you know the cartoon cat that loves lasagna?"

 

"Garfield?"

 

"Yeah! In one of the comics in the book, a black widow tells Garfield she ate her mate. It's funny." 

 

"Sounds hilarious."

 

I wondered how Garfield would approach duck mating rituals . . .

 

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