Quack Attack

 

From "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" to "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer," there's no shortage of animal allusions in Christmas songs, which is a source of delight for many zookeepers.  Few animal-themed carols are quite as well-known, however, as "The Twelve Days of Christmas."  For the three or four people who are not familiar with the song, it involves one's true love making a gift of not only assorted ladies, lords, and maids, but a heck of a lot of birds - seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, and, of course, a partridge in a pear tree.  Whether these gifts are cumulative, and therefore by the twelfth day the recipient has received a total of 42 swans or just seven, is a matter of some uncertainty.

"That sounds like a lot of excitable people and angry birds that I'm expected to bring into my house," one coworker of mine complained at the very thought of it.  To be fair, if it had been seven bison snorting and six alpacas spitting, she probably would have been delighted.  The basis for her objection was that most of the avian gifts were waterfowl.

Working with waterfowl, one thing that has consistently amazed me is how terrified so many people are of them.  And I don't just mean lay-folks, I mean keepers who will go up against a variety of dangerous animals, but let them stumble across a nesting pair of Canada geese and they run for their lives.  I'm currently reading "The Chronicles of St. Mary's," a science fiction series about time-traveling historians.  The protagonists go up against velociraptors, the Trojan War, Vesuvius, and Jack the Ripper with courage and fortitude - but are frequently sent screaming for their lives by the swans that inhabit the pond outside their offices.

I suspect that it's because ducks, geese, and swans are, when you think of it, pretty ridiculous-looking birds.  It's hard to take them seriously - until they make you take them seriously.  I once caught up a tiny little ruddy duck, not much bigger than a potato, it's head a little bigger than my big toe.  It launched itself at me fiercely, biting and slapping with its wings.  Once I was finished with what I needed to do, I put it down.  Then, I waited two minutes for it to let go of my finger.  I could only aspire to have the sort of confidence.

Plucky, pugnacious, and undeniably fearless.  Forget the turkey.  Why didn't our Founding Fathers pick a goose as our national bird?