and then there were three

Life is strange...

I'm in Brooklyn, waiting for my job to start. It's been pushed back a full week and I'm forced to take some down time. I'm staying at my girl's place in Crown Heights, a story in itself (Crown Heights) but the real story is this.

The other night I came home and crashed early to wake in the wee hours of the morning. In the living room was a fish tank terrarium, about 25 gallons I think, and inside were 5 cheeping ducklings. Gorgeous little fluffy things flapping and cheeping and settling, then flapping and cheeping and eating and flapping in the water and settling.

The third grade teacher who lives here did what apparently, a lot of teachers do for their young students in springtime. She got some duck eggs and incubated them. It's a sweet story when you think about the little kids with the duck eggs waiting for them to crack and watching as the tiny bills peck through. Wet little birds drying off and shaking themselves into moving balls of fluff before their very eyes. How many of you experienced this as children?

Not so sweet when you see the ducklings in a little terrarium because the teacher has no lesson plan for their future. No idea what to do with them now and they are stuck in Crown Heights with no guidance about being ducks. They're pretty instinctive those little things. And cute as hell.

I took the teacher and the ducklings to Prospect Park where she let them swim and eat from the lake. Another sweet visual. In her words "If they don't come back to me it was meant to be". The phrase pounding into my brain as I envision the helpless 4 week old babies being eaten by raccoons or worse, rats.

Two nights ago one of the ducklings died in the night. It was lame and wouldn't have survived the wild and I found it dead in the morning. The teacher slept late so I removed the duckling and wrapped it up and placed it in the freezer. I left the teacher a note 'do you want to show the kids this part of the life cycle?'.

Today we're down to three. They are the healthy ones. I looked up what they need to eat and how they should be taken care of but teacher seems oblivious and completely out of tune with the animal kingdom. She seems to have done little to find them a home and no city wildlife agency will take them.

Not my place, not my place, not my place is my new mantra for the ducklings, for me. It's too much for me to take on, so I chopped some fruit and vegetables and left them in the fridge for the teacher while I was making my dinner last night.

When I awoke the terrarium held three healthy looking birds chirping and flapping and saying good morning. One more gone last night.

I get my coffee from the freezer and realize she has taken the frozen duckling with the newly dead. Do you think she took then back to the classroom?