The Tale of Lucky Duck

A LickSkillet Story
by Frances A. Day

Lickskillet Ranch has a pond. When Aunt Frankie and Uncle Mike first moved here, the pond got that yukky green stuff all over it in the summer. What to do? Get some ducks and geese. Ducks and geese do a marvelous job of keeping the pond clean and seeing to it that there aren’t too many bugs or fish.

That was a few years ago. Every year now the female ducks make nests and sit on eggs hoping to have baby ducks.

Oh, they are so proud when those little ducks hatch! They waddle around the pasture and show them off to everything in sight. Then they take them right down to the pond for a swimming lesson.

That’s were the problem comes in. There are turtles in the pond and they like to eat little ducks.

We tried to catch the ducks as soon as we saw them heading to the pond. You would be surprised how fast a day old duck can be. We missed. Soon we noticed that there were only three of the seven little ducks following their mother. Of course the older they get the faster they are.

We discussed it and came to the conclusion that if we were going to have baby ducks they couldn’t stay with their mother. We scattered some grain and waited. Eventually the mom duck came to the sneaky feast. We used a fish net and caught the only baby that was left. That’s why we call it Lucky Duck. It didn’t think it was that lucky getting snatched like that.

We put it in with chickens that were about the same age. Now three months later it wants to stay with the chickens. I don’t think it even knows what the pond is or what it’s job is. I guess it will really feel confused when it finds out the chickens’ job is to lay eggs and a duck’s job is to keep the pond clean. Meanwhile every time I get close to it I try to catch it to put it back with its mother but I've had no luck yet. Only that one last little duck is Lucky in this situation.