Another egg story

7. The I.Q of Farm Animal

I have another story from childhood involving eggs. This is a few years later, I was in fifth grade and a lot had happened since I was the five year old egg bomber. We had moved but we once again had a small farm and we once again had more ducks. These ducks started out as pets that lived in our bath tub. A lot of animals have spent time in this bath tub and very few children. It was a horrible green tub, and it still lives at my mother’s house. When our ducklings were old enough they were moved into our pond. It was a large pond full of chocolate milk water that smelled like reeds and rain. There were frogs and gold fish in this pond and more often than not a kid or two. We didn’t really “swim” in this pond. But we would float around on inflatable toys, and these big blue barrels. If we weren’t feeling lazy we would break out the big silver canoe and paddle back and forth across it, trailing our toes in the cold water. Sometimes we would chase the ducks with the canoe but not too frequently, I was trying awfully hard to make up for the egg incident by being extra nice to anything that had webbed feet. Our ducks were not too bright though. This was a discovery a friend and I made one summer day when we were out swimming around in the pond. Although sensitive about the whole egg issue it had come to my attention that these ducks didn’t lay as many eggs as the old ones did. That was strange. My friend and I were hunting for the one or two eggs we generally found around the pond edge when she noticed something in the water. It was an egg. Interesting. It must have slipped down the bank from a higher nest, but when we looked for the nest there was none to be found. So we returned to the water, wait a second, there was another egg! This just doesn’t make sense at all. The whole nest must have fallen into the water, or the water must have risen to cover the nest. We figured we would find 5 to 10 eggs at most in the water. So we got our floating toys and very, very slowly we floated around the edge of the pond picking up eggs. Four hours later we had a total of not 5, or 10 but 76 eggs. We loaded up my little blue wagon and took it up to the house to show my parents. The eggs were in various states of decay, some were green others were bright white as if they had just been laid. That settled it, our ducks were DUMB. They were laying their eggs in the water. We found 76 eggs by just looking around the shore. Imagine how many other eggs were still in the bottom of the pond. I had been swimming in this water all summer… ewwww….I lost some of my love for ducks. We took the eggs out to the compost heap far behind our house. We threw a few, carefully, but the smell got to be so horrible that the game quickly lost its fun. However when I look back on the picture of the two smiling, soaking wet kids with the wagon completely full of rotten eggs I have to smile. It helps that the memory does not come equipped with the smell.

Bombs away!!!! It was a good time being a kid out in the middle of no where. :)