as if tens of duckies suddenly cried out in terror and were silenced
I love
my ducks, and between me and my neighbor upstairs our duckies are quite happy. When I open my sliding door any time during the day, all the ducks change course and come over to my part of the pond. They know that door sliding open from this part of the pond == either me or my neighbor, and from our patios comes food. Smart ducks. I thought they were pretty fearless, too, since they come right up on the patio, up to the screen door and everything. Then I realized that my cats are
intrigued but are not duck-stalkers. They're duck
watchers, that's it. My cats only make chittering sounds when a finch or a mourning dove hangs out. In fact, Deuce goes nutso for mourning doves, probably because they're kinda chunky and slow. Anyway, they don't get all stalkery over ducks, they just watch them.
But the other day my ducks were a little standoffish. There was a great disturbance in the duck Force, you see, because a few miles away some stupid bastard asshat
went on a rampage and killed a bunch of ducks [use
bugmenot for access].
Shortly after midnight last Friday, four security cameras at the Delta Queen Classic Car Wash, 981 E. Hamilton Ave., captured images of a driver running over ducks five or six times in a 16-minute rampage. The driver also got out of his car several times to chase the birds -- some of them ducklings -- and appeared to grab one or two by the neck and throw them against or into his car.
Mike Davis, who manages the Delta Queen, said about a dozen of the animals survived the attack. Most of them are descendants of Cheese and Quackers, a pair that were dropped off by a customer in 1972. "There have been ducks here ever since the day it opened," he said.
Kimble Simpson is one of two employees who regularly take care of the ducks, and he had a soft spot for a big white male he named Rocco. Because he and his mate were recent drop-offs, they pretty much were rejected by the rest of the flock. Rocco always stood his ground, and didn't run away from the others.
Rocco and his mate were the first to die. The person responsible, Simpson said, was "heartless."
"First he went after the slowest ones, and then he went after the babies," he said.
He
went after the babies. He was also stupid enough to do this on tape, and it's only a matter of time before the cops catch this blight on society, which is A Very Good Thing because anyone who spends any time watching cop dramas knows that a violent rampage against people is the next step after a violent rampage against ducks or other helpless animals.
