Wild Ducks, Wild Man and Wild Conversations on Campus

 I went down to visit the swans today after lunch but they were on the other side of the lake, which is a mile walk to get there and back. So I sat on a bench 15 feet from the water’s edge and not more than a minute later four Brown-Teal Ducks waddled by me and dove into the lake right in front of me. Seconds later a mother Mallard and her six babies came marching by and the babies got herded into a stone-lined creek that meanders through the campus and ends up by the underground parking garage entrance. The stream was cast in dark shadows and the babies seemed to be taking a bath. It was Saturday so why not.

As I tracked the swans as they moved ever so slowly closer I was thinking, “Why would someone put a pole right in the perfect viewing spot for lake gazing?” Then I noticed a 7-8 inch pulley with a chain attached to the pole and my eyes followed the chain upward. It ended with a 16 unit Purple Martin condo. I’d been to that bench before but I’ve been so busy watching for goose poop I don’t want to step in that I hadn’t bothered to see any higher up than the cattails along the shore.

Speaking of water foul poop, the maintenance man put on quite the show this week. He is tasked with scraping goose poop off the sidewalks every day and he was using a golf cart to get around when he encountered a group of 35+ geese in our parking lot which isn’t far from the lake the way the crow flies (or in this case a goose flies) but it's quite a long away from the lake if you walk around the building to get there. Our poor maintenance man was chasing on foot and by golf cart all the geese, trying to round them up so they’d all go in one direction---back towards the lake. Those of us who were on our decks were having a good time watching and worrying at one point he’d tip the golf cart over or run it into a tree. But the harder he worked the more the birds tried to scatter in all directions. Of course we had to heckle him and he shouted back, “As soon as those babies can fly there’s going to be an all out war!” 

I’m from the camp that enjoys seeing and hearing the ducks, geese and the bullfrogs but there is another camp that would love to see them all shot or poisoned which is against the law. Some hate them because of the poop and others because their honking, quacking and bullfrogging around interferes with their sleep. I keep reminding them they chose to live on a lake. Lakes come with wildlife. And ohmygod, this lake comes with tons of dragonflies which probably explains why we don’t have the mosquitoes that everyone feared we get. As I sat on the bench I easily saw several dozen dragonflies playing tag in the cattails. By the way, did you know that dragonflies can literally die of fright at the sight of fish, according to an article I just read? Everything is relative, isn't it. If a pride of lions was stalking me I would hope I'd die of fright before they started eating me for dinner.

Speaking of dinner, recently four people spent the entire time talking about their dissertations in great detail while I and another woman without an advanced degree sat stone quiet. At one point I wondered how something that happened so long ago could be so important to them now when the world around us seems to be falling apart. Mass shootings, the January Sixth Hearings, supply chain issues in the stores. Covid. Current events are rarely ever discussed here, except in book club as it relates to something we’ve read. (I love that group.) I miss talking about current events. Admittedly my husband and I used to be news junkies, but here those kinds of conversations get shut done quickly when certain people are in the mix. They want to pretend we’re living in Never-Never Land where the illusion is that everything is fun and beautiful. But ignorance is not bliss when there’s a darkness waiting to destroy Never-Never Land aka the world as we know it.

At that dinner it came out that I was taking art classes on the same campus at the same time as one of the women talking about their dissertations and she was naming professors trying to figure out if we’d been in any of the same classes. I could no more name the professors I had back in the ‘60s than I can name the countries in the old Soviet Union or the members of the Backstreet Boys, for that matter. I’ve always known my mind tends to focus on the broader context and not the details but here that foible smacks in the face every time my peers talk about this kind of stuff. My peers can even name their grade school teachers. Not me, but I could describe what my grade school teachers wore to work---their sensible black shoes with the chunky heels, their dark colored cotton dresses with their padded shoulders and broad, white lace or matching collars. I can remember the kindness of one teacher and the pure evil of another who smacked me and the other left-handers daily with a ruler.

At the end of our last book club we talked about getting our Life Enrichment Director to start a monthly discussion group for those of us who want to talk about current events. She’s usually very responsive to our ideas so fingers crossed I might find a place where those of us who want to compare our reactions to the world outside our campus can go and not get the Never-Never Land treatment. ©

 

Photo at the top is one I snatched off the internet of a martin house located in the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuse. Ours is below and was built by the residents in the assisted living building. I can't take good photos anymore but I tried with my phone. (below).

This is our bird condo with the bench I sit on to the right. In the distance on the right is the Memory Care building, on the left are our town houses.

Hard to see but it's a swan chasing a goose as seen from the bench in the photo up above. Also hard to see through the trees is the independent living apartments where I live.

One of the swans, photo taken from the bridge in between the town houses and the Memory Care building.

This is the creek where the baby ducks played and that's an assisted living building on campus. Being on a continuum care campus it's comforting to know where exactly I'd get down graded to if something drastic happens to my health. There are 7-8 couples here where one of them lives in our independent living apartments but their spouses are a short walk away in one of these other buildings on the lake.