Memories – Rae Spencer

Focusing on Mallards Part V: Hunting by the Numbers

August 8, 2025August 9, 2025Rae SpencerLeave a comment

Content Warning: This multi-part blog post contains references to hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds. This installment contains a photograph of a duck hunter with his kills—a pair of dead Mallards. If you choose not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Photograph of a brood of Mallard ducklings huddled for a nap in the sunshine. The downy ducklings are yellow and brown with prominent eye stripes. Their mother is sleeping behind them, beak tucked under her wing feathers. Her feathers are shades of tan and gray, and she also has a prominent eye stripe. All are gathered on the stone border surrounding our dragonfly pond. — *Photograph of a huddle of Mallard ducklings resting in the sunshine on the stone border of our dragonfly pond. Their mother is just behind them (right of frame).*

Like most of my blog journeys, this long perseveration on Mallards started with questions about a visitor in the yard: What happens to a Mallard hen’s flight muscles while she is nesting? If she spends a flightless month on the nest, then two more flightless months escorting her flightless ducklings, how does she keep her muscles in flying condition?

A Mallard hen stretches her wings after a splashy bath in a small backyard dragonfly pond. She is standing tall in the water, facing the camera, wings extended behind her. Her feathers are mostly speckled and striped shades of brown with bright white coloration on the underside of her wing feathers. A round, floating solar-powered fountain is spending up a small spray of water (left). An array of water plants are growing in the pond, including water lilies. Tall irises and grasses grow around the pond's river-stone border, filling the background with greenery. — *Photo of the Mallard hen who inspired this blog series. In this photo, she is standing tall in the dragonfly pond, facing the camera as she flaps vigorously after a splashy bath.*

A prolonged literature search produced partial answers. And raised more questions.

In the end, a research paper out of North Dakota (Krapu, 1981) confirmed that wild Mallard hens lose significant body weight during nesting, including most of their fat reserves. But the researchers did not measure or comment on flight muscles.

Beyond that 1981 anchor point, my flight muscle question lies abandoned, waiting for another researcher or reader to pick it up. Until then, I’m content with Part III‘s conclusion: Only the Mallards know.

Photo of a Mallard hen standing in a shallow spot in the dragonfly pond. Her brood of ducklings are gathered beside her. The hen's feathers are shiny and sleek, speckled brown and tan. The ducklings are downy with brown and yellow markings. Both hen and ducklings have the prominent dark eye stripe common to Mallards. In the background, large smooth river stones are stacked loosely around the pond's border. A pair of conch shells are visible, incorporated into the border. — Photo of a different Mallard hen, one who visited in the spring of this year (2025), resting in the dragonfly pond with her ducklings. She was wary of me and my camera and taught her ducklings to be wary as well. This is how wild Mallard ducklings learn to be wild Mallards. Usually. Later in this series I will introduce some exceptions.

Caught in tangles of tangents

I can’t resist tangents. They are how my world expands. And how my mind works, OCD and all. So here I am, more than a year later, still exploring this labyrinthine idea web of Mallards and Mallard literature.

But this particular perseveration, my Mallard fixation, runs deeper than most of my blog ideas. In fact, it runs straight into a mire of social and psychological issues that I am poorly equipped to navigate. So here I remain. Grappling for words and wisdom in the Mallard archives. Because much of what motivates me to care about this world, much of what motivates me to read and write, is also in the Mallard archives.

Sharp black-and-white image scanned from a slide. The image dates to the 1970s, and shows me as a pre-adolescent. I am squatting behind a smallish round wire cage, which has a leather carrying strap. I am holding onto the wires of the cage and peering into the distance. My body language and facial expression suggest that I am misbehaving and trying not to get caught. Inside the cage, a speckled white and gray duck is panting or vocalizing, beak open. The duck is too large for the cramped cage. — Photograph of me in some awkward childhood era, caught coveting a duck at some fair or other event. I was attempting to stay small and inconspicuous behind the big fancy duck, so that Mother wouldn’t catch me coveting.

In all of the decades between the anxious moment captured, above, and my present seat at the blog table, I’ve lived in the tensions between mine and not-mine. Between the coop and the wetlands. Between the self-protective urge to stay small and inconspicuous and the inescapable longing for expansive connections.

I expect most readers live in the same tensions. It’s part of being human. It is, perhaps, part of being Mallard, as well.

Photo of five Mallard ducklings climbing onto the border of the dragonfly pond while their mother watches from the water. Four of the ducklings are immediately visible, center frame, but the fifth is partially hidden behind a clump of short grass. The ducklings are downy with yellow and brown markings. One has tiny water droplets clinging to its head and neck. — Photo of five ducklings climbing out of the dragonfly pond while their mother keeps watch from her position in the water. The fifth duckling is small and inconspicuous, hidden behind a tuft of grass on the right.

Out of my comfort zone

These Mallard posts have turned into foundation work for a policy argument.

(Spoiler alert: I am not crafting an argument against hunting.)

Policy arguments are not my norm and most definitely are not my creative strength. But I’m wading in.

I’m wading in without a map or floatation device, hoping for the kind of synergy that sometimes makes words more wise than their author. Hoping for fewer small and inconspicuous silences.

Photo of a Mallard duckling peering over the stone border of the dragonfly pond. This photo was taken at ground level, so the duckling's head is only partially visible over the stones, concentrating focus on the duckling's eye. A second duckling's rounded back, fluffy with down, appears to the far right of the frame. — *Photo of a duckling peeking over the border of the dragonfly pond. The duckling has downy markings of yellow and brown and has the exaggerated forehead and eye proportions of infant cuteness.*

I grew up around poultry, both wild and domestic. I also grew up around guns and hunting. Through all my many long years, I have accepted, unquestioning, most of the arguments in favor of hunting as both a sport and a science-backed approach to wildlife management and conservation.

I still accept some of these arguments. But I’m developing deep resistance to others. Resistance based on all of this reading about the history and practices of Mallard hunting and conservation.

(Let me repeat that spoiler: I am not crafting an argument against hunting.)

Blurry sepia-toned photo of a man standing beside two dead Mallards, which are hanging from a string or wire so that they are at head-height. The man is wearing a brimmed hat, a buttoned-up shirt with a rumpled collar, and a padded coat that appears to be made of canvas or similar material. The Mallards are male and female, judging by their plumage, and one of the female's wings hangs in way that suggests the wing was broken when she was shot. The outdoor scene shows trees that have lost their leaves for winter and a very small wooden outbuilding with a tin roof. The outbuilding looks to me like an outhouse or smoke shed. — Photo of an unknown man posing with two dead Mallards. One of the Mallards is in male plumage, the other in female plumage. I found this photo, which likely dates from the 1920s or 30s, in an album belonging to a great aunt. Based on labelling of a companion photo, the man’s name was Harry Kenyon. I don’t know how or why he ended up in Aunt Birdie’s album.

I’m not comfortable arguing policy, which means there will be throat clearing and wandering off-topic. I am, after all, a blogger. Not a lobbyist. A poet, not a lawmaker. I seldom demand rhetorical precision of myself, in my creative work. Which is part of why I enjoy blogging. Rhetorical precision is for the classroom and office, not the blog.

But there are upsides to making this argument in blog form. There’s freedom from structure and stricture. My hybrid interweaving of literature review and memoir is choice, not style guide. More importantly, there’s no peer review. I am my own editor and publisher, so I’m allowed to make overt appeals to emotion. Including photos and videos of ducklings.

These photo and videos are my unsubtle attempt to convince readers that ducks are stakeholders in policy discussions about waterfowl hunting.

Photo of a Mallard hen leading her ducklings out of the dragonfly pond. All are standing on a section of flagstone set level into the yard. In the background are a coiled green hose and an orange, plastic, five-gallon bucket stamped with white lettering reading "Let's do this" in all-caps. The Mallard hen is maybe a foot tall and has mostly brown feathers edged with tan, except for a patch of blue edged with black and white on her wing. The ducklings are maybe three or four inches tall and have downy feathers with yellow and brown markings. There are seven ducklings readily visible, though they are difficult to count due to how they are crowded together. (In all, this hen had eleven ducklings.) — *Photo of a Mallard hen and her ducklings exiting the dragonfly pond in spring, 2025. In the background, a bright orange bucket is stamped with the big-box slogan “Let’s do this”.*

Sport hunting is a profitable mine, and Mallards are a form of ore

Unlike many of my blog topics, Mallard hunting isn’t a rabbit hole. It’s a multi-level, vastly profitable mine regulated by international treaties and cooperative relationships between state and federal agencies.

Everything in the Mallard mine is complicated by tradition and money and land.

This isn’t about the flight muscles

I introduced a few ideas about the capitalism behind the science curtain in Part II. And where Mallards are concerned, science isn’t the only interested party. Mallard hunting (and farming) is not an independent storefront on the town square. This is big business and big money, so big policy questions come into play.

Who owns wildlife, on public and private lands? Who gets to decide how wildlife is exploited, on public and private lands? When is wildlife no longer wild? (Keep inserting “on public and private lands”, as the questions roll on…) What are the roles and aims of conservation work? Who gets to own and discharge firearms? Why and how are tradition and research guiding individual and community decision making, when it comes to hunting?

This isn’t about flight muscles.

Except, isn’t it?

Mallards are poultry. And once Mallards are defined as poultry, once flight muscles are defined as breast meat, Mallard hunting is only about the flight muscles. Wild Mallards are protein harvested by shotgun.

Photo of a Mallard hen grazing through a helping of wild bird seed that I scattered into the grass (and weeds) just beside the dragonfly pond. Her eleven ducklings are either watching her eat or beginning to wander back toward the pond.
They sampled the seed but didn't eat much. — *Photo of a Mallard hen eating bird seed. She is surrounded by her eleven ducklings. The ducklings sampled the seed but were unimpressed.*

Just how big is this business?

A 2006 survey from the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) found that “…waterfowl hunters represented 10 percent of all hunters, 7 percent of all hunting-related expenditures, and 6 percent of all hunting equipment expenditures” (Carver, 2008, pg. 3).

Here’s the waterfowl hunting numbers for 2006 (derived from Carver, 2008, Table 1, p. 4):

Number of US hunters (ducks)	1,147,000
Number of US hunters (geese)	700,000
Number of US hunters (all waterfowl)	1,306,000
Reported US trip expenditures (waterfowl)	$493,987,000
Reported US equipment expenditures (waterfowl)	$406,298,000
Total US spending (waterfowl)	$900,285,000

Those zeros are not a typo. That’s over nine hundred million dollars spent, in 2006, on hunting ducks, geese, and other waterfowl. While more than half of those dollars went to the travel industry, some four hundred million dollars were non-travel purchases, including “rifles, shotguns, other firearms, ammunition, telescopic sights, decoys, hunting dogs and associated costs. Also included are auxiliary equipment such as camping equipments, binoculars, special hunting clothing, processing and taxidermy costs. Due to small sample sizes, special equipment purchases such as boats, campers, trucks, and cabins are excluded…” (Carver, 2008, Table 1, pg. 4).

The author of this report adjusted the economic impact of waterfowl hunting through input–output modeling, to estimate how this spending radiates through the economy: “The trip expenditures of $494 million by waterfowl hunters generated $1.2 billion in total output while equipment expenditures of $406 million generated $1.1 billion in total output in the United States” (Carver, 2008, pg. 10).

So it’s fair to say that waterfowl hunting is a multi-billion dollar industry, in the US. That’s multi-billion per year. And Mallard hunting is a massive chunk of that industry. “Hunter reports indicate that mallards made up about 43% (5.5 million annually) of the ducks taken before 1960, when mallard regulations were less restrictive; the Duck Wing Survey indicates that mallards have made up 33% of the harvest (3.6 million annually) since 1960″ (Martin & Carney, 1977, p. IX).

Photo of a Mallard hen settling for a rest beside the dragonfly pond. In this phot0, most of her ducklings were hidden beneath her, tucked into the feathers of her chest and abdomen. One duckling has not settled, yet, and is standing just under her neck, looking around. Another duckling is barely visible to the right of frame, mostly hidden by a tuft of short, cut grass. — *Photo of a Mallard hen settling for a nap with her ducklings beside the dragonfly pond in spring, 2025. Tucked beneath her chest, one duckling has raised its head to look around.*

Given the money spent on hunting ducks, geese, and other waterfowl, it’s not a surprise that “…waterfowl hunting is positively correlated with income. That is, as household income increases, the percentage of waterfowl hunters for each group also increases. Income is also positively correlated with the participation rate of all hunters. However, all hunters do not tend to be as affluent as waterfowl hunters” (Carver, 2008, pg. 6).

This is not subsistence hunting. For the majority of duck hunters in the US, suspension of duck season would not equate to food insecurity. Yes, many hunters eat the ducks they kill. But they would still be able to eat, even if they killed no ducks.

How many Mallards are there, anyway?

Efforts to count the continent’s ducks began as early as the 1940s, when researchers tramped out into the marshes for hand counts. Then pilots joined the work, providing population estimates (and species distributions) for flocks spotted during aerial flyovers. Hunter surveys, requesting that hunters report how many and what kinds of ducks have been killed in the season, add a final dimension of data. At the confluence of these ongoing data streams, USFWS calculates Mallard “abundance”, which isn’t exactly a population count but is close enough for my purposes.

As of 1974, “The estimated size of the continental mallard population in May has ranged from a high of 14.4 million in 1958 to a low of 7.1 million in 1965. Generally, the mallard population began to decline after the 1958 peak until 1962, and remained below 10 million birds until 1970. The decline and consequent low level of the mallard population between 1959 and 1969 generally coincides with a period of poor habitat conditions on the major breeding grounds” (Pospahala, Anderson, & Henney, p. 49).

Over more recent decades (from 1992–2024) the “mid-continent” stock of US Mallards has ranged between 6.2 million and 11.9 million (USFWS, 2024, p. 12). (There are management purposes at work, in this focus on “mid-continent” Mallards, which I will get to later.)

Photo of a Mallard hen standing in a shallow place in the dragonfly pond. Her ducklings are gathered in the water, beside her. Her head is tipped slightly to her left, right eye angled toward the sky in search of aerial predators. Anthropomorphized, her head angle and expression look questioning. — *Photo of a Mallard hen and her ducklings in the dragonfly pond, taking a brief break from their wanderings in the spring of 2025.*

In 2024, Mallard abundance in the US registered some 6.6 million. In 2023, about 6.1 million (USFWS, 2024, p. iii).

With recent numbers hovering near the low end of the 1992–2024 Mallard abundance range, and below the lowest 1960s numbers, it seems that the Mallard glass is currently half-empty. But if accounts from the late 1800s and early 1900s are accurate, the North American Mallard glass has been half-empty for over a century. (Drop a pin in this claim. There will be evidence later.)

Where do North American Mallards come from, and where do they go?

Continental Mallard production can vary wildly over a very short span of years. For example, 1957 produced a count of 22.1 million Mallard “young”, but 1961 saw only 5.9 million (Anderson, 1975, p. 33). Granted, it’s difficult to count Mallard young, but there was undoubtedly a major decline between 1957 and 1961.

By the 1970s, it was clear that Mallard production was related to the number of ponds in Mallards’ breeding grounds. (Here is where that focus on mid-continent Mallards starts to become important, as the largest and most productive breeding grounds are in the north and central portions of North America, in “prairie pothole” country.) And, prior to 1960, the number of ponds steadily declined everywhere. But habitat was never the only factor.

Nesting season and shooting season

The existence of a “long-term average” population number for Mallards, of around 7.9 million (USFWS, 2024, p. iii), flattens into stasis a seasonally dynamic population. Spring and summer are boom and winnow seasons. Some 75% of Mallard mortality occurs in first-year ducks, either in the nest or during the weeks immediately after hatching, before young birds learn to fly (Anderson, 1975, p. IX). Then fall and winter bring the hunter’s guns.

“…it may be predicted that about 60 out of every 100 mallards flying south along the Mississippi Flyway will be hit by shot” (Bellrose, 1953, p. 358-359).

Photo of a Mallard hen just stepping up onto the stone border of the dragonfly pond. In the background, splashes and sprays of water fill the air, churned up by her recent splashy bath and the excited actions of her ducklings. — *Photo of a Mallard hen getting ready to climb out of the dragonfly pond. Behind her, ducklings are splashing and playing in the water.*

After Mallards survive their first summer, death by shotgun accounts for a significant percentage of overall Mallard mortality. Of the adult males that die each year, about 50% die by shotgun (Anderson, 1975, p. 24). The percentages are slightly lower for females (40%) and first-year Mallards (45%) (Anderson, 1975, p. 24).

Given all these shotguns, and all of the other Mallard hazards out there, the majority of Mallards that survive their first summer do not live more than two adult winters (Anderson, 1975, p. IX). That doesn’t mean that a three-year-old Mallard is an old Mallard, only that it is a lucky Mallard. Even luckier Mallards have lived as long as 13 years in the wild (a few female Mallards), and one particularly charmed male Mallard survived 18 years (Anderson, 1975, p. 26).

Harvest by shotgun

In the US, prior to 1960 hunters bagged some 5.5 million Mallards every year (Martin & Carney, 1977, p. IX). It’s worth repeating that number: 5.5 million Mallards. Every year.

After hunting regulations were tightened in 1960, the Mallard kill dropped to about 3.6 million per year (Martin & Carney, 1977, p. IX). Such numbers fluctuate, of course, and have dropped somewhat further since the 1970s. But hunting still claims millions of Mallards, each year. USFWS estimated a Mallard harvest of 2,042,668 birds, in 2022 (USFWS, 2023, Table 1E, p. 25).

Up through the 1970s, close to a quarter of the entire North American Mallard population was killed by hunters, every year (Anderson & Burnham, 1976, p. 40).

Based on the numbers previously cited for 2022 (2,042,668 Mallards killed by hunters) and 2023 (estimated population of 6.1 million), it seems that perhaps one-third of the US Mallard population continues to die by shotgun every year.

Overkill?

Only a few paragraphs ago, the USFWS estimated a 2024 Mallard population of 6.6 million. In 2024, a pre-1960 harvest (during years when harvests averaged 5.5 million ducks per year) would have obliterated the US population of Mallards.

In fact, the pre-1960s binges, on top of widespread habitat destruction, dealt multiple near-obliteration blows to North American Mallards. Starting early in the 1900s, hunters and researchers agreed that something needed to be done to save the Mallards. At least, they agreed that something needed to be done to save Mallard hunting.

The first (documented) North American Mallard bottleneck, circa 1920

Prior to the 1900s, hunters spoke of North America’s duck populations in awe-tinged phrases.

“It is about the finest country you could imagine in the wildest flights of fancy; Ducks getting up under your feet at every yard; Hawks, Goatsuckers, Prairie Chickens, and small birds in all directions… I shot a Teal and a splendid Shoveller drake for the pot. I can fancy I hear you exclaiming against the barbarism of eating such a bird; but I am getting daily accustomed to birds which are considered rare in England, and regard them now from a more utilitarian point of view” (Wood, 1885, p. 225).

“During this autumnal movement the number of ducks frequenting the lakes and ponds throughout Manitoba is prodigious. I shall not soon forget the hundreds I saw on the innumerable ponds between Rapid City and the Oak River, whilst on an excursion towards Fort Ellice, in the middle of October, 1883. Yet those I saw must have been as nothing compared with the abundance to be seen in some other places. A friend who had several days’ shooting at Totogon, near the south end of Lake Manitoba, about the end of September, describes the ducks as being so numerous that only the terms ‘acres’ and ‘millions’ could adequately express their abundance. The majority were Mallards, Anas boscas…” (Christy, 1885, p. 133).

By the 1920s, Mallards populations had declined to a notable low:

“The duck marshes on the Saginaw River no longer teem with water fowl. In early September and before the first frost the cackle of the Carolina rail is on every hand. These little birds—the Sora, seem as plentiful as ever, so I have not given up the marshes of the Saginaw entirely, but once or twice in the early part of September I get out the old canoe and with Alphonse to paddle or push, I take the trip through several miles of the Cheboyganning rice beds and usually get what the law allows of rail shooting, but in making all of this distance through acres and acres of rice, one or two ducks is all I see in place of the thousands of old” (Mershon, 1923, p. 73).

And this is where I leave the Mallards, for now. A poor remnant of a once thriving species, scarce and growing scarcer into the 1920s. In the next post, help arrives.

Photo of a Mallard hen and her ducklings in the dragonfly pond. Taken along ground level, the photo shows the hen's head and neck and back, with a blurred foreground of stone blocking the rest of her. Framed under the arch of her neck and chin, one of her ducklings is in sharp focus, facing the camera. — *Photo of a Mallard hen and her ducklings exploring the dragonfly pond in spring, 2025. Here the hen is in the foreground and one of her ducklings is framed by her silhouette.*

A housekeeping note (or, rather, a territory-keeping note)

Throughout this post, I’ve switched back and forth between talking about North American Mallards and US Mallards without much fanfare. Doesn’t it sound presumptuous? It’s almost as if I have forgotten that there are other countries on the continent. (Doesn’t it sound familiar?)

But from here on out, I’ll need to take more care. Because, starting in the early 1900s, lawmakers and researchers divvied up North America’s Mallards. There were, and still are, jurisdictions and flyways. More importantly, genetic work has identified two discreet and rarely-intermixing populations of Mallards, an eastern gene group and a western gene group (Lavretsky, Janzen, & McCracken, 2019). And my particular policy argument involves eastern Mallards, alone.

Preview of Part VI: The US judicial branch decides who owns the Mallards that visit US lands, and funding arrives for conservation

As long as there were plenty of Mallards, everywhere, distinctions between North American and US Mallards were moot. But as Mallard populations dwindled, hunters came into conflict over who got to shoot the Mallards that remained. And with increasing scarcity came increasing value, along with politicians to squabble over resource ownership.

The problem was (and still is, to a certain extent) that Mallards have always migrated according to their own maps, which existed long before humans decided that land could be owned. Given that the North American Mallard mine spans three (or more) countries, including most of the states in each country, and that Mallards are valuable ore, who owns the profit? Who gets to harvest this particular protein, and how should they be allowed to market it?

North American Mallards as a species have continued breeding and migrating, and US Mallards as a resource have continued falling into hunters’ bags, but the species and resource exist on two seemingly separate planes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes summed it up succinctly, in a landmark case that upheld the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty: “The whole foundation of the State’s rights is the presence within their jurisdiction of birds that yesterday had not arrived, tomorrow may be in another State and in a week a thousand miles away” (Missouri v. Holland, 1920, para. 6).

Photo of a Mallard hen drifting off to sleep while still standing. She is perched on the sunlit, stony border of our dragonfly pond. Her brood of ducklings are scattered under and in front of her, most in different sleep poses. One duckling is still awake, though visibly drowsy with half-closed eyes. Another duckling is barely balanced on the edge of a rounded, smooth stone, and appears on the verge of falling off backwards. Yet another duckling has nodded off with its neck bent and the tip of its beak just touching the sun-warmed rock. — Photo of a Mallard hen resting (asleep while standing up) on the stone border of the dragonfly pond in spring, 2025. Her ducklings are napping in a loose cuddle-heap, sprawled from just under her chest to almost a foot away. Some of the ducklings are slumped awkwardly in sleep, exhausted from their first hours off the nest, while others are fidgeting for a more comfortable position.

References

Anderson, D.R. (1975). Population ecology of the Mallard: V. Temporal and geographic estimates of survival, recovery, and harvest rates. Resource Publication 125. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. https://nwrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16473coll29/id/4786

Anderson, D. R., & Burnham, K. P. (1976). Population ecology of the Mallard. VI: The effect of exploitation on survival. Resource Publication 128. U. S. Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. https://nwrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16473coll29/id/4899

Bellrose, F. C. (1953). A preliminary evaluation of cripple losses in waterfowl. In James B. Trefethen (Ed.) Transactions of the Eighteenth North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference (pp. 337-360). The Wildlife Management Institute. https://wildlifemanagement.institute/conference/transactions/1953

Carver, E. (2008). Economic impact of waterfowl hunting in the United States: Addendum to the 2006 national survey of fishing, hunting, and wildlife-associated recreation. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Services. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-04/1153.pdf

Christy, R. M. (1885). Notes on the birds of Manitoba. The Zoologist: A Monthly Journal of Natural History, 3rd Series, IX(100). https://ia801303.us.archive.org/27/items/zoologist85lond/zoologist85lond.pdf

Gillham, C. E. (1947). Wildfowling can be saved. In Ethel M. Quee (Ed.), Transactions of the Twelfth North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference (pp. 47-52). The Wildlife Management Institute. https://wildlifemanagement.institute/conference/transactions/1947

Krapu, G. L. (1981) The role of nutrient reserves in Mallard reproduction. The Auk 98, 29-38. doi: 10.1093/auk/98.1.29

Lavretsky, P., Janzen, T., & McCracken, K. G. (2019). Identifying hybrids and the genomics of hybridization: Mallards and American Black Ducks of Eastern North America. Ecology and Evolution (9), 3470–3490. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.4981 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.4981

Martin, E.M., & Carney, S.M. (1977). Population ecology of the Mallard: IV. A review of duck hunting regulations, activity, and success with special reference to the Mallard. Resource Publication 130. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/5230112/report.pdf

Mershon, W. B. (1923). Recollections of My Fifty Years Hunting and Fishing. The Stratford Company. https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofm00mers_0

Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416. (1920). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/252/416

Organ, J. F., Mahoney, S. P., & Geist, V. (2010). Born in the hands of hunters: The North American model of wildlife conservation. The Wildlife Professional 4(3), 22-27. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267749137_Born_in_the_hands_of_hunters_the_North_American_Model_of_Wildlife_Conservation

Pospahala, R. S., Anderson, D. R., & Henney, C. J. (1974). Population ecology of the mallard. II: Breeding and habitat conditions, size of the breeding populations, and production indices. Resource Publication 115. U.S. Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife. https://nwrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16473coll29/id/10213/rec/1

USFWS (2023). Migratory Bird Hunting Activity and Harvest during the 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 Hunting Seasons. USFWS. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/migratory-bird-hunting-activity-and-harvest-report-2021-to-2022-and-2022-to-2023.pdf

USFWS (2024). Waterfowl Population Status, 2024. US Department of the Interior. https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-08/waterfowl-population-status-report-2024.pdf

Wood, T. B. (1885). Notes on the zoology of Manitoba. The Zoologist: A Monthly Journal of Natural History, 3rd Series, IX(100). https://ia801303.us.archive.org/27/items/zoologist85lond/zoologist85lond.pdf

Focusing on Mallards Part IV: Positioning My Perspective(s)

March 10, 2025Rae SpencerLeave a comment

Content warning

This multi-part blog post contains references to the hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds. This particular installment contains references to hunting other prey and killing chickens from a backyard flock. If you decide not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Photograph of five Mallard ducklings resting on the stone border of our dragonfly pond after a tiring swim. Four of the ducklings are settled in and nodding off, while the fifth is still standing and fidgeting. The ducklings are fluffy with down (immature feathers), have yellow and brown markings, and each still has a visible remnant of egg tooth at the beak tip. They were less than 24 hours old when this photo was taken. — *Photograph of five Mallard ducklings resting on the stone border of our dragonfly pond. Four of the ducklings are settled in and nodding off, while the fifth is still standing and fidgeting.*

Livestock are living stock. And sometimes pets.

Until they are not.

Growing up in rural Tennessee, I had daily exposure to food chain realities. Our freezers (we had two) were stocked with meat from assorted livestock we raised. Livestock we loved. Chickens and cows, during my memory years, with vague early memories of pigs.

A 1970s-era photo, scanned from our family archive, of four fancy chickens roaming free in our yard. Two of the chickens have dark feathers with reddish highlights, one with additional iridescent green highlights on its wing feathers. A third chicken has almost all light reddish-brown feathers. The fourth's feathers are black over its head and neck, reddish tan across its chest, and gray over its wings, back, abdomen, and tail. The gray feathers on its back and abdomen are fluffier and downier than regular feathers. All four chickens have topknots of varying fluffiness and fanciness. All four are notably dainty. — *A 1970s-era photo of four “banties” *(bantams)*, dainty chickens with variously fancy topknots, roaming free in our yard.*

A 1970s-era photograph scanned from our family archive. Three young cows are standing near a fence line, pasture and woods in most of the background, with one wall of a weathered wooden shed visible. The cows are browsing through a scatter of trampled hay. The cows' coat colors indicate their mixed heritage. The cow closest to the camera strongly favors a Brown Swiss milk cow: its body is mostly dark brown with lighter shading on its legs and ears and a very pale muzzle with a dark nose. The middle cow likely has some Charolais beef breeding: its coloration is a patchy mix of pale tans and white. The cow furthest from the lens has markings typical of Hereford beef cattle: primarily reddish coloration with white legs, a white stripe down its back, and a white face. — *A 1970s-era photograph of three young cows standing near a fence line with pasture and woods in the background.*

Another 1970s-era photo, scanned from the family archive. In this photo, three red pigs are grazing in a dry, clean patch of short pasture grass. The pigs are likely of Duroc descent, given their red coloration and the widespread popularity of the Duroc breed. — *A 1970s-era photo of three red pigs grazing a patch of short pasture grass.*

Our chickens and cows and pigs had individual names and individual personalities. We raised them and cared for them and loved them. But food chain reality means that livestock exists to be eaten. No matter how cherished. No matter how tame.

In this 1970s-era photograph, a red-and-white Hereford cow stands over her very young and very sleepy calf. The calf is red and white, like its mother, and its coat is thick and curly and damp in places. Just behind this cow and calf, a small cluster of black cows have gathered. These background cows would be of Angus breeding. All of the cows are standing in a patch of scattered straw and hay. The ground under the straw and hay would probably have been a trampled mire of mud. The bare-limbs tree line, just visible, indicates a winter setting. — *Yet another 1970s-era photograph from the family archive. Here, a red-and-white Hereford cow stands over her very young calf. The calf is curled up on the ground, sleepy eyes and ears drooping.*

Off to slaughter

Our cows and pigs were slaughtered and processed by local-ish butchers, but Mother slaughtered our chickens with a hatchet. Then she cleaned and portioned their carcasses while I collected and bagged bloody feathers.

In this 1970s-era photograph, Mother is feeding a flock of some 15 chickens, along with 3 white ducks, from a repurposed coffee can filled with whatever mix of feed and corn was on the day's menu. The chickens are mostly gray-and-white speckled Dominiques (we called them "domineckers"), with a single white leghorn rooster and a few Rhode Island red hens. In the background, our white station wagon is parked under a pole shed, along with several bicycles. The photo is poorly focused with faded colors. — In this 1970s-era photograph, Mother is feeding our small flock of chickens and ducks. At the moment this photo was snapped, Mother was bent over, using her free hand to enforce order. If photos came with sound, you would hear her scolding the greedy birds and coaxing the shy ones.¹

In reviewing family archives for this post, I was struck by how similar the above scene is to a photo from the early 1900s, found in our maternal grandmother’s album. There was clearly something generational going on at our table.

Scanned image of an early 1900s photograph from my grandmother's photo album. The sepia-toned black-and-white image shows a flock of large chickens foraging in a tight bunch, probably having just been given feed. Some of the chickens have dark feathers and some have light feathers. The background is bare-limbed trees (winter), a large flat field, a post-and-wire fence with a closer fence having its lower section blocked off by tin. There is also a small outbuilding with an open door, with what appears to be a tractor parked in front. — *Early 1900s-era photograph of some twenty chickens foraging in a bare yard with farm equipment, fences, and an outbuilding in the background.*

Wildlife can also be living stock, to a hunter

Small and sundry prey

In addition to eating chicken, beef, and pork raised on our property, we sometimes ate squirrels and rabbits shot by my father and brothers. It’s possible that our beagles sometimes helped on these hunts. (It’s more likely that our beagles hindered these hunts.)

A small square photograph of three beagles, motion-blurred, play-fighting on top of a wooden doghouse. Shadows of fencing are visible on the doghouse. I believe these three beagles are Daisy, Fella, and Little Bit, though we also had a fourth beagle named Dan. — *A 1970s-era photo of three naughty beagles play-fighting on top of a doghouse.*

I helped skin and clean the squirrels and rabbits, and I remember being fascinated by their soft fur. I also remember Mother muttering and tsking while she cooked squirrel and rabbit meals. She breaded and fried the meat, and served barely edible, extremely tough portions with open disdain.

I developed a lasting case of meat snobbery, rooted in Mother’s disdain. Squirrels and rabbits were in the lowest edibility tier. Nothing lower was served. No frog legs. No snake, turtle, or alligator meat. No opossums.

Something generational was going on at our table there, too, but in the opposite sense of backyard flocks. Mother preserved her family’s tradition of raising chickens for slaughter, but put a permanent end to the family tradition of opossum hunting. (Scroll quickly if you don’t care to see a sepia-toned group of early 1900s ancestors showing off a bunch of dead, dying, or faking-death opossums, along with the dogs that facilitated the hunt.)

Scanned image of a photograph from my grandmother's photo album. In the album, the hand-printed caption read "The morning after our great Opposum hunt. 'We won't forget.'" This deep-sepia-toned black-and-white photo, circa early 1900s, shows five people standing in a row with a fourth person kneeling in front. Posing outdoors in a yard, the people are holding at least three opossums. The opossums are either dead, dying, or faking death. The woman to the far left is holding a smallish black-and-white dog, while the man kneeling in front is restraining two hounds. Probable (possible?) identifications include standing L to R: Sarah Harrison, Georgia Linton, Charlie Linton, Bill Linton, and an unknown girl; kneeling in front: Buck Linton. — *In my grandmother’s album, this photo is labelled “The morning after our great Opposum hunt. ‘We won’t forget’.”*

That’s my grandmother, second from the left, one hand behind her back and the other hand dangling an opossum for the camera. This particular hunt (it wasn’t the only time the family hunted and ate opossums) was special because one of the cousins (Sarah Harrison, standing on the far left) had come to visit.

Scanned image of a sepia-toned black-and-white photograph in my great aunt's photo album. In the album, the hand-printed caption reads "Sarah Harrison / Popman's cousin / 'the Possum hunt'". The outdoor photo shows a woman wearing a plaid dress with intricately pieced trim and pockets, white stockings, and white shoes. The woman is holding two dead, dying, or faking-death opossums, one opossum in each hand. The woman's dark hair is pinned up, and she is looking at the camera but not smiling. Beside her is a smallish black-and-white dog with a bobbed tail and half-pricked ears. The dog is looking up, attention fixed on the woman and opossums. — *This photo was in a great aunt’s album. The photo is labelled: “Sarah Harrison / Popman’s cousin / ‘the Possum hunt’ “²*

I should add that Mother’s disdain was not coherently taxonomic. Reptiles, amphibians, and insects were off the menu, but so were ducks, geese, and goats. Which meant some of our livestock were exempt from slaughter. What’s more, “dairy” came from cows and cows exclusively. There’s no logic here, only family and cultural tradition.

Cue any stand-up comic mocking a southern drawl. For that matter, cue any bully standing in their own tradition, mocking other traditions.

Photograph from 2021 of a white-tailed deer trotting beside a paved path at Back Bay Wildlife Refuge in Virginia Beach, VA. The background and foreground are winter-toned in oranges and browns of dormant shrubs and grasses, with occasional greens of live oaks and wax myrtles typical of coastal Virginia. The deer's head and tail are up, ears angled to listen behind her, in a body language that suggests alertness verging on alarm but not panic. Moments after I snapped this photo, the deer vanished into the tall seagrass. — Photograph of a white-tailed deer trotting beside a paved path at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. In my southern-Tennessee lexicon, “venison” very specifically refers to deer meat. I only learned in my middle-age that the word “venison” has different and wider definitions in different cultures.

In my late teen and early adult years, my oldest sister’s boyfriend often gifted us venison. I was particularly fond of what I called “Bambi roast” and “Bambi spaghetti”. Bambi, it seems, ranked high in my edible-mammal hierarchy. A bit below pet chickens and cows, but certainly above squirrels and rabbits. Which were at least on the list. Unlike opossums.

Here in my middle years, my childhood memories of skinning squirrels and rabbits seem dreamlike. As if those skinny arms and small hands weren’t my own. After all, any brief stroll through my blog history will find some tender post about squirrel and rabbit nests. I cringe, extra, thinking about any of the yard’s visitors heading into a hunter’s sights, then into a frying pan or stew pot.

Photograph from the spring of 2024. Five Mallard ducklings, less than two days old, are floating in a cluster in our dragonfly pond. Two of the ducklings have their heads cocked, one eye looking skyward. They are responding to an alarm call from their mother, who had spotted a hawk wheeling overhead. — *Yes, Mallard babies. I’m talking about you. I’m aching to protect you.*

But I didn’t always equate animals, my own pets and livestock in particular, with the meat on my table.

Further aside… so many eggs

Gathering the eggs

On mornings when my oldest sister was too tired or busy or sick to tend the chickens, I was roused and sent in her place. I remember egg gathering as sleepy, smelly, spidery work. Early morning work. (I’ve never been an early morning kind of girl.)

Egg gathering meant wrestling the chicken pen latch, which grew tighter each year as the posts and gate warped. Then I had to put down my bucket—to unclip the rusty chicken house latch and heave the rickety door over hills of weeds, dirt, and dung—and usually had two or three hens perched in my hair and on my shoulders by the time I bent to retrieve the bucket. Finally, I would stumble over the plank sill into the warm, dimly lit interior.

(Yes, I always stumbled. My severe astigmatism couldn’t navigate the sudden change from light to dark, and the hens dashed in and out through the door in frenzied delight.)

Our chicken house was closer in size to a closet than a house. I don’t have any chicken pen/chicken house photos to share, but almost any wire pen around almost any vine-covered tin-roof-and-plank outbuilding would be an accurate visual.

Veils of cobweb hung from the low rafters. Snakes, flies, wasps, spiders, and light entered and exited through gaps in the walls and roof. A short row of nest boxes lined one wall. The floor was dirt, feathers, dung, and broken shells. The chicken house smelled strongly of chickens and dust, but also of cat urine (from our army of yard cats) and dog feces (from the adjoining dog pen) and, every so often, of predators.³

Shooing hens from their nests, or reaching beneath those who refused to be shooed, I gathered eggs by touch more than sight. (It’s not as easy as it sounds. Our hens didn’t give up their eggs willingly, especially to the tentative little sister of their usual egg-gatherer. Wing slaps left bruises, and claws and beaks drew blood.)

The warm, sticky, tough-shelled eggs that I gathered didn’t feel like they held nascent chicks and ducklings.

A 1980s-era photograph of a red hen and her brood of variously yellow, tan, or striped chicks, all safely enclosed in one of our wood-and-chicken-wire coops. The stocky hen shows strong Rhode Island Red characteristics, but the chicks' mixed genetics were more typical of our flock. — *A 1980s-era photograph of a red hen and her brood of eleven(ish) striped chicks, all safely enclosed in one of our wood-and-chicken-wire coops.*

Breaking the eggs

Our father began leaving during my pre-teen years. He sold the cows, let the fences lay where they fell, and stopped shoring up the barn and sheds. After he finished leaving, neglect cascaded into decay. Vines pulled down the chicken house and the gate fell off the pen.

Both pre- and post-chicken house era, egg gathering mistakes were inevitable. In the chaos of the crowded, rickety henhouse, broody laying hens stole eggs from the adjacent nests of setting hens. Predators and predator alarms rolled and bounced eggs between nest boxes. An egg laid by a setter a week or more ago, carefully incubated since, might end up alone in a layer’s nest. An egg laid by a layer last night might end up in a two-weeks-along setter’s nest.

After our flocks were entirely free-roaming, they hid their nests so well that eggs were often days old before being found. Eventually, increasing incidences of “bad eggs”, coupled with decreasing egg demand as siblings moved out, halted all egg collecting.

Late 1980s-era photograph of five large white eggs in a rough nest on the ground. The flat nest is made only of trampled grass and dry, dead weeds. The nest is positioned beneath an unused steel livestock gate that is leaning against the wall of a post-and-panel shed. — *Photograph of five eggs, probably duck eggs, in a nest on the ground. This nest was tucked between an unused livestock gate and the outer corner of a shed.*

The term “bad eggs” most obviously referred to rotting or rotten eggs. The kind that burst on their own or floated in water. But “bad eggs” also encompassed fertilized eggs that were mistakenly collected mid-incubation.

When an incomplete carcass, some mid-development stage of a chick or duckling, spilled from an egg I had cracked, I writhed with regret. It happened often enough, in my early years, that I still crack eggs into a separate bowl when cooking.

After our egg-collecting years ended, our increasingly feral flock was left to hatch and raise what young they could in whatever nests they chose.

Late 1980s-era photograph of a gray-and-tan feathered game hen with black tail feathers. The hen is setting on a nest that she made in a deep pile of straw left in the bottom of a large wooden box that once held bales of straw. The colors in this photograph are over-bright due to using a flashbulb on the camera, and the image is somewhat blurry. — *A late 1980s photo of a game hen (conveniently named “Game Hen”) sitting a nest of eggs in a straw-lined box.*

Late 1980s-era photograph of the inside of an ancient out-of-service livestock trailer that served as a shed for storing straw, hay, and feed. The trailer's flooring is wooden planks laid between steel bars. A massive, open-topped wooden crate/box is positioned in the middle of the trailer, an overturned tin can is on the floor in front of the box, and a large weathered 50-gallon oil drum is to the right. Game Hen is perched at the entryway, looking out. A reddish hen is perched on the edge of the large box, and another hen (mostly in shadow) is perched on the oil drum's closed lid. In the far background, shadows and reflections show equipment, bottles, and boxes stored (and long forgotten) on a shelf. The massive box once held bales of straw, but by this time held only a deep bed of leftover straw which was used by the cats and chickens for warm bedding. The oil drum held bags of feed. We kept the trailer doors closed, most of the time, but there were plenty of holes through the sides and bottom that the chickens, cats, rats, and opossums used for entry- and exit-ways. — A late 1980s view inside the “trailer” (a dilapidated, out-of-service livestock trailer that we treated as a bonus shed for feed storage). The massive wooden open-topped box/crate (center frame) once held bales of straw, so it was lined with broken bales. *Inside this box, in the right back corner, was Game Hen’s nest.*

Late 1980s-era photograph of 11 white eggs and 7 brown eggs in a nest made of straw. This was Game Hen's nest to sit, though the eggs were likely provided by multiple hens. The nest was in the far back-right corner of a massive open-topped wooden crate/box the sat in the middle of the ancient out-of-service livestock trailer we used for straw, hay, and feed storage. — *The same late 1980s nest, photographed after bribing Game Hen with feed. Heaped in the nest are 11 white eggs and 7 brown eggs. The hens literally shared prime nesting spots.*

Late 1980s-era photograph of a golden-eyed black-and-white cat (Mischief) nursing a newborn litter of kittens. All are settled in a deep, warm nest of straw, loosely lined with an old blue shirt. There are five kittens, three tortoiseshell and two solid white (destined to develop silver-and-gray "points" typical of siamese, but with the much longer hair typical of ragdoll cats). This litter of kittens was delivered and nursed in the massive wooden open-topped crate/box that we used to store straw in the ancient out-of-service livestock trailer that served as our feed shed. — *Another late 1980s-era photograph, taken in the exact same spot in the trailer’s box of straw as the above nest photos. This is my cat Mischief nursing a newborn litter of five beautiful kitte*ns. Two of these kittens will reappear later in this post, in a photo taken after they were grown.

Growing up in rural Tennessee, eating the animals and dissociating

While my egg-mistake memories are mostly visual, wetly curled bodies in a puddle of albumin, my memories of chicken, squirrel, and rabbit carcasses are sticky with remorse and smell like blood, grease, and guilt left out in the sun.

But expressing regret, remorse, or guilt at the table was forbidden. So was refusing to eat what was served. I don’t remember being told these rules, nor do I remember hearing these rules explained to my siblings. For that matter, I don’t remember learning these rules.

It is this lack of learning, this full memory cache with no record of creation, that warrants using the word “dissociated”. As a girl growing up in rural Tennessee, I dissociated from the eggs and meat on our table.

I coped with my forbidden regret, remorse, and guilt by inventing a private delusion, by defining eggs and meat as a different form of matter than living animals.

Mid-to-late-1980s-era photograph of our back yard, taken in late winter/early spring (indicated by the budding saplings in the background). Our small mixed flock of chickens, ranging in color from red-and-black to solid white, are resting, foraging, and roaming around the trunks and roots of a massive maple tree. An ancient out-of-service aluminum-sided livestock trailer is parked to the left, our wire-and-chain-link dog pen is in the left background, and a weathered old doghouse is in the middle background (used by cats, chickens, and yard dogs for warmth). — Mid-1980s photograph of our mostly free-roaming flock. We wouldn’t have eaten many of their eggs, in their later years, and their tough old carcasses would have been among the last added to the freezer. The trailer is visible to the left, with the dog pen behind it. The derelict chicken pen is hidden in the far center background, behind the row of saplings and shrub-like weeds.

Depression on top of dissociation

The photo immediately below is more metaphor than image. The worn paint and sagging shingles on our house and concrete-block wellhouse, the decaying barn-remnants to the far right, the unkempt pasture and yard, and the overgrowth marking downed fences. All of these illustrate the state of our dysfunctional household during my teen and young adult years.

A late-1980s or early-1990s-era photograph of our back yard. The edge of the house is just in view to the left, with worn paint on the wooden siding and facia boards. The concrete-block wellhouse, with its wide concrete stoop, sits just behind the house. Here, the wellhouse's roof is in bad disrepair, sagging with rot. Two cats and a hen are perched on the wellhouse, waiting to be fed. The yard is patchy, with some areas of dead grass and some areas of overgrown grass. The crumbled and rotting remains of a sloped loading chute and our barn are visible to the far right, and a heap of discarded debris (the remains of a fallen pole shed roof, the old pig pen fence, the old pig shed, and one wall of the barn) is thinly hidden behind a tall (>6 foot) curtain of dead brush. The woods in the far background are winter-bare. — A late 1980s- or early 1990s-era photo taken in the back yard. Perched atop our concrete block wellhouse, two cats and a red hen are waiting to be fed. The cats, Annie (right, tortoiseshell colored) and Gizmo (left, ragdoll marked) grew up out of the exact trailer-straw litter pictured above. The hen, whose name I’ve lost to time, was one of Game Hen’s daughters.

The hungry cats and hen on the wellhouse roof, waiting for a meal of table scraps and cheap kibble, are confusion, sorrow, and loneliness. This was the era of boyfriend venison and day-old bread. Of freezers stocked from clearance ads. Of oldest sister tending the garden in the dark of too-early mornings and too-late evenings because she was working three jobs while going to college.

We no longer ate the livestock we raised and loved, but clearance-case chicken and ground beef added a new facet to my dissociation. Grocery eggs and meat were always cold and bloodless, had never been embodied in the yard. And I had learned what it meant to be hungry.

Re-associating, for health reasons

Or, “Thanks for the genes, Dad”

My father died of heart disease at the age of 52. I was mid-teens, and he seemed so old. But he wasn’t old. I am, currently, older than 52.

I don’t feel so old.

I like being me, and I would like to continue being me for some good long number of years past 52.

Perseverating on 52

One of the ways I’ve packaged and carried grief is a fixation on 52nd birthdays. As each of my four older siblings passed 52, I breathed a bit easier. Long before I reached 52, I began researching and planning. Partly because of the grief fixation, but also because my cholesterol levels have been alarming physicians since I was a teen.

Note to father: Next time, maybe try leaving us money, instead.

Statins and exercise are no match for my father’s genes. My last resort for living past 52 was a complete overhaul of my diet. (I should have started there, but I’m a silly human with silly human habits.)

Call it plant based. Call it vegetarian. Call it desperation.

An unexpected side-effect of my diet overhaul has been re-associating with animal protein. My health ambitions were easier to realize when I reminded myself that pork is slaughtered pigs. That beef is slaughtered cows. That chicken is slaughtered chickens. That grocery eggs come from hens housed in industry conditions, not back yards.

Without my dad’s cholesterol, I would probably still perceive meat and living stock as unrelated forms of matter.

Enter the Mallards

Timing is everything, and my various perspectives and journeys are not random. If you are still reading, you might be starting to see a signal. Or not.

What looks like signal to me likely looks like noise to others.

Perhaps in a later post I’ll explain how a literature search through the history of prion testing catalyzed an ongoing reaction between a brood of suburban ducklings, a fetish-level case of nostalgia, a dysfunctional family history, and a stubborn set of lipid genes, resulting in this multi-part Mallard post.

Photo from the spring of 2024, of a Mallard hen and her brood of ducklings swimming in the dragonfly pond. Here the hen is reaching up, tugging seeds from a long grass seedhead that had sagged over the pond's edge. One of her ducklings is reaching up, sampling the grassy seeds, while the others are milling around, watching. — *In this photo from the spring of 2024, a female Mallard duck shows her brood how to eat grass seeds from a seedhead dangling over the dragonfly pond.*

For the present, I’m a recovering carnivore lured to herbivory by a longing to live past 52. I grew up in a rural environment where the animal protein on our table came from our own yard, pasture, and woods. And I’ve known what it is to be hungry.

These perspectives matter, though it’s not entirely up to me to decide how they matter.

In the next episode…

Mallard hunting is big business.

Image scanned from my great aunt's photo album. This black-and-white photo, vaguely sepia-toned, shows a man in thick winter garb—newsboy(?) hat, hunting jacket (lots of pockets), bulky pants, and worn boots—holding a long gun and two dead Mallard ducks. In the album, a hand-printed caption on an adjoining photo identified this man as Harry Kenyon. — Early 1900s photograph of a duck hunter holding a gun and two dead Mallards. This photograph was scanned from a great aunt’s photo album. The hunter’s name was Harry Kenyon. I do not know who he was or how his image landed in my great aunt’s photo album.

2. While I’m perfectly awful at recognizing genetic and cultural heritages based on peoples’ features and clothes, I recognize that this distant cousin doesn’t look or dress like my grandmother’s family. I would love to know more about her. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled photo caption.)

3. My parents believed weasels were the chickens’ craftiest predators, blaming almost all egg, chick, and hen losses on an invisible and trackless family of mustelid carnivores, traceable only by scent. Years later, I realized that the scent I was taught to identify as “weasel” covered everything from the musk of a water snake to fox scat to mouse urine. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

Dekay’s Brownsnake (ophidiophobia alert!)

March 30, 2024Rae Spencer2 Comments

A snake by any other name

A cold and drowsy snake visited in January. The yard had experienced floods, in days before, so I expect the snake fled some drenched winter hideaway. Moving slowly in the chill, our visitor spent a half-hour or more searching for dry accommodations in leaves that had settled against our house’s concrete foundation.

Photo of a Dekay's Brownsnake peeking from under a dry brown leaf. The scales on top of the snake's head are mottled brown with pale tan coloration between scales. Its large brown eye has a round pupil. — Photo of a Dekay’s Brownsnake peeking from under a dry brown leaf. The scales on top of the snake’s head are mottled brown with pale tan coloration between scales. Its large brown eye has a round pupil.

Over the past decades, I’ve caught rare glimpses of these snakes in the yard. Each time, I filed them in the generic “garter snake” folder of my internal memory bank. My flawed and over-capacity garter snake folder, in my flawed and over-capacity memory, holds all of the small, striped (or not), yard-sized snakes I’ve ever encountered. As long as the small, striped (or not), yard-sized snakes weren’t green, I called them garter snakes. (Green snakes are, obviously, “green snakes” in my flawed internal memory bank.)

Many of my “garter snakes” were, most likely, garter snakes.

Photo of a strongly marked snake with tan stripes and checkerboard patterns of dark brown and pale tan. I believe this is, indeed, an Eastern garter snake. The dapper little snake didn't want to cede its sunny spot beside the paved walking trail and assumed the defensive posture shown in this photo--head raised, neck in an s-curve, body slightly flattened and puffed. Everything about this posture says "if you don't leave me alone I'll bite you". (The snake attempted a strike shortly after this photo. I didn't get bitten, because I was wary enough to stay out of strike's reach, but I'm ashamed that I didn't heed the snake's clear request to be left in warm contentment. Instead, in my zeal for photos, I intruded so thoughtlessly that I made the little creature anxious enough to strike. I apologized, before leaving, but couldn't restore the snake's sun-soaked relaxation.) — Photo of a strongly marked snake with tan stripes and checkerboard patterns of dark brown and pale tan–an Eastern garter snake. This dapper little snake didn’t want to give up its sunny spot beside the paved walking trail and assumed the defensive posture shown in this photo–head raised, neck in an s-curve, body tense. Everything about this posture says “if you don’t leave me alone, I’ll bite you”. The snake attempted a strike shortly after this photo. I didn’t get bitten, because I was wary enough to stay out of strike’s reach, but I’m ashamed that I didn’t heed the snake’s clear request to be left in warm contentment. Instead, in my zeal for photos, I intruded so thoughtlessly that I made the little creature anxious enough to strike. I apologized, before leaving, but couldn’t restore the snake’s sun-soaked relaxation.

Many of my “garter snakes” were, most definitely, not garter snakes.

Garter snake. Not garter snake. Other snake. Each time I get a chance to patch my flawed and over-capacity internal memory bank, I’m relieved. Especially here, in my middle years.

As it’s been too cold for snakes to emerge, except in emergencies, I haven’t tested my brownsnake memory patch against snakes found in the wild. Or in the yard. So I’ve been testing it against my photo archive. At the moment, I’m still mid-correction, my internal dialogue still chirping “garter snake” when I come across photos of small, not-green, striped (or not striped), yard-sized snakes, still needing the gestalt-shift between first impression and new information. Still needing the pause and closer look. Not always garter snake. Sometimes, Dekay’s Brownsnake.

This little Dekay's Brownsnake, no more than 10 inches long, retreated over a tree root as I mowed the back yard. At the time, my internal dialogue tagged the photo "garter snake" and rambled off toward a more interesting (at the time) topic. Now, captivated by the newness of "Dekay's Brownsnake" in my internal dialogue, I clearly see the identifying keeled scales and parallel lines of dark spots down its back. — Photo of a Dekay’s Brownsnake, no more than 10 inches long, retreating over a tree root as I mowed the back yard. At the time, my internal dialogue tagged the photo “garter snake” and rambled off toward a more interesting (at the time) topic. Now, captivated by the newness of “Dekay’s Brownsnake” in my vocabulary, I clearly see the identifying keeled scales and parallel lines of dark spots down its back.

Is the image a vase or a pair of silhouettes? Is the snake a generic “garter snake” or a Dekay’s Brownsnake? The gestalt-shift between recognitions feels like wonder to me.

As for snakes in vases, or other yard art, maybe they are neither garter snake nor Dekay’s Brownsnake?

Photo of a snake's tail dangling out of the bottom opening of a hollow piece of ceramic yard art. The tiny snake, smaller in diameter than a pencil, was reddish-brown with a pale belly. I labeled these photos "garter snake", though I now wonder if they show a reddish variant of Dekay's Brownsnake. Or maybe some other species, still unnamed in my memory? — Photo of a snake’s tail dangling out of the bottom opening of a hollow piece of ceramic yard art. The tiny snake, smaller in diameter than a pencil, was reddish-brown with a pale belly. I labeled these photos “garter snake”, though I now wonder if they show a reddish variant of Dekay’s Brownsnake. Or maybe some other species, still unnamed in my vocabulary?

Another photo of the reddish snake that overwintered in a hollow piece of ceramic yard art. In this photo, keeled scales are clearly visible along the snake's sides, but I can't see enough of the snake's back to know if there are keels on its dorsal scales, as well. I tried following the identification key-map provided by the Virginia Herpetological Society, to no avail. (Please comment if you can help with the ID!) — Another photo of the reddish snake that overwintered in a hollow piece of ceramic yard art. I tried following the identification key-map provided by the Virginia Herpetological Society, to no avail. Keels are readily visible on the snake’s side scales, but no dorsal scales are visible in the photos, which is where my attempts at identification break down. (Please comment if you can help with the ID!)

I’ve seldom had the luxury of hovering here, at the pivot point of internal correction. But my time, this winter, has slowed with the chill. Long nights and short days trigger depression and anxiety, steering me toward torpor. And this winter’s torpor has been more meditative than some years. I’ve lingered over these photos of our little reptile visitor. I want to call this moment learning, except that overused word feels both too small and too large. As do other words, like knowledge and discovery.

Photo of a very small Dekay's Brownsnake emerging between dry brown leaves. In this side view, the snake's overlarge eye and round pupil are fully visible, along with a row of dark spots along its upper lip. Its pale lower lip curves up in an anthropomorphic smile. — Photo of a very small Dekay’s Brownsnake emerging between dry brown leaves. In this side view, the snake’s overlarge eye and round pupil are fully visible, along with a row of dark spots along its upper lip. Its pale lower lip curves up in an anthropomorphic smile.

Such words, and the ideas they attempt to convey, have been claimed and reclaimed, used and abused, lauded and cursed for centuries. Well before I began grappling with my own understandings and misunderstandings, philosophers and critics set their pens to the task of recording, preserving, and passing on observations that make reality a little bit safer, a little bit more predictable, for future generations of humanity. So many men (yes, mostly men) writing letters to a future with so much more to observe.

Macro photograph of the face and eye of a Dekay's Brownsnake, taken in January of 2024. The small snake's large eye shows a round pupil and an iris of iridescent brown and bronze. Its facial scales are mottled brown. — *Macro photograph of the face and eye of a Dekay’s Brownsnake. The small snake’s large eye shows a round pupil and an iris of iridescent brown and bronze. Its facial scales are mottled brown.*

What goes into a name? Constructing (or deconstructing) Dekay’s Brownsnake

Dekay’s Brownsnake has the dubious honor of being named after two 19th century (male) naturalists. Its taxonomic genus-species name is Storeria dekayi. This caught me by surprise. An entire genus of snakes named for David Humphreys Storer (1804-1891), an American physician and naturalist.

Species names have long been used to preserve and honor the names of explorers, scientists, and/or celebrities (a dusty old practice, also evident in common names such as Dekay’s Brownsnake, that is under discussion and overdue for a change) but genus names tend to be more functional. Genus names often highlight one of the traits (or missing traits) that identify the included species as similar enough to be grouped together while simultaneously dissimilar from other groups. Granted, the genus Storeria remains a small genus (only four species, according to the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology/Animal Diversity Web), but still….

I couldn’t resist a stroll through the search engine. I never can. Literature search is my favorite phase of projects, and archives are my happy place.

According to his obituary, David Humphreys Storer (1804-1891) was the dean of Obstetrics and Medical Jurisprudence for Harvard Medical School. He also had a great fondness for collecting. His collections encompassed everything from coins to birds eggs, and he cultivated connections with toll takers and sailors to bolster his coin, shell, and fish collections. His work with the Boston Society for Natural History led to a position with the Natural History Survey of the Commonwealth, where Storer managed the fishes and reptiles portion of the survey, resulting in the eventual publication of A History of the Fishes of Massachusetts.

Storer’s internet presence also includes an 1831 pamphlet, noted on page two to be the “Report of a Trial: Miles Farmer, versus Dr. David Humphreys Storer; commenced in the Court of Common Pleas, April Term, 1830, from which it was appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, and by consent of parties, referred to Referees, relative to the transactions between Miss Eliza Dolph and George Washington Adams, Esq., son of the late President of the United States. It is impossible but that offences will come; but woe unto him through whom they come! It were better for him that a mill stone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea. —Luke, xvii. 1, 2. Reported by the Plaintiff.” (!?)

I must admit that my interest in Storer dissipated before I read the entire pamphlet. Historical gossip aside (“…the transactions between Miss Eliza Dolph and George Washington Adams…”? Might this have been a scandal worthy of Lady Whistledown?), the pamphlet doesn’t contribute to my relationship with the little snakes in my yard.

Neither the obituary nor the pamphlet help me understand the man, David Humphreys Storer, who was so admired as to have a small genus of small snakes carrying his name to this day. And here lies part of the trouble with eponymous taxonomy. No matter how admired, in collecting circles, nor how despised, in other circles, Storer’s name cannot help me understand the habits and habitats of the little snakes I’m currently obsessed with.

James Ellsworth Dekays’ name doesn’t help, either. Another American physician and naturalist, Dekay (1792-1851) participated in a different state sponsored natural survey, for the state of New York. Dekay eventually published his findings in Zoology of New-York: Or the New-York Fauna: Comprising Detailed Descriptions of all the Animals Hitherto Observed within the State of New-York, with brief Notices of Those Occasionally Found Near Its Borders, and Accompanied by Appropriate Illustrations. In Part III (Reptiles and Amphibia), Dekay described a small brown snake collected by “…John Crumby, Esq., a zealous sportsman and acute observer, who captured [the snake] as it was swimming across a large bay on the northern coast of Long Island” (pp. 46-47).

Dekay’s three-paragraph note about the little brown snake is widely attributed as the first description. (A formality often conflated with discovery.) Dekay first used the genus name Tropidonotus but later corrected it to the genus name Coluber. Today the genus Storeria is classified within the family Colubridae.

A quick search engine query leads to a slightly more interesting article about Dekay–“Between the First Blind Cavefish and the Last of the Mohicans: The Scientific Romanticism of James E. Dekay” by Aldemaro Romero. But again, this article doesn’t help me understand or appreciate the yard’s snakes.

So my stroll through the binomial etymology of Storeria dekayi found my first example of an eponymous genus, two 19th century (male) physician-naturalists, a sex scandal with political connections, an article that tethers blind cavefish to James Fenimore Cooper, and one unfortunate little brown snake that fell prey to a sportsman while the snake was (likely) minding its own snake-business, swimming across a large bay on the coast of Long Island.

Reconstructing my memory, brown snakes included

But why do I crave a relationship, a learning or knowing, with the small, shy, nocturnal, snail-and-slug eating snakes in my yard?

Macro photo of a Dekay's Brownsnake. The snake was approaching the lens, so its head and eye are in focus while the rest of its body is out of focus. Its facial scales are mottled brown, with darker spots under its eye. The scales of its lower lip are very pale tan. — Macro photo of a Dekay’s Brownsnake. The snake was approaching the lens, so its head and eye are in focus while the rest of its body is out of focus. Its facial scales are mottled brown, with darker spots under its eye. The scales of its lower lip are very pale tan.

Why, after so many years of being content to see these snakes as “garter snakes”, do I care so much now? I suppose part of my previous contentment is rooted in a youthful mis-hearing and mispronunciation. Garter snakes were garden snakes, most often encountered during gardening. Small, not-green, striped (or not), yard-sized snakes. As long as they weren’t venomous, they were simply garden snakes.

Venomous-or-not was my earliest snake knowledge, my first lessons in the garden. Some snakes were, and are, venomous. Avoid. Don’t get bitten. Be afraid, if you must. If that’s what keeps you safe, be afraid of snakes. (Of course, all of this gets mixed in with Genesis, with Adam and Eve and a serpent that spoke of temptation. The lesson, again, was fear.)

Our father was a snake killer. Every snake he saw, he slaughtered with whatever tool was closest at hand. His histrionics over snakes were the stuff of family lore, which added a dose of realism to the lesson. My older siblings, and sometimes our mother, ridiculed our father’s snake phobia. I absorbed an adjacent lesson, that the reflex killing of snakes was an action worthy of ridicule.

I developed a fascination with these animals that were so terrifying to our father. I wanted to be not-afraid of what our father feared. (And I wanted to avoid being another target of family ridicule.) Rat snakes, king snakes, corn snakes, green snakes, garden/garter snakes. All the hen-house thieves and barn guardians. All the camouflaged brush and grass dwellers. I watched for them with a cautious kind of hope, longing to catch a glimpse. To see them glide across a rafter or ripple into the next row of okra or bask, egg-sated, near the hen house.

And then, during my years in the boggy woods, the fear-laced lessons of my past peeled away like the hull of a seed.

Photo taken in “the woods”, sometime during winter (bare trees, no underbrush, a thick blanket of fallen leaves) in the early 1990s. Shown here is a portion of the spring-fed creek that was the center of all activity in the woods. It was a shallow creek with shallow banks, flat gravel in places and woody in places, the wooded banks supported by exposed tree roots and moss. I visited the creek and woods as often as, and for as long as, time would allow. I was always escorted by a pack of dogs (and sometimes a cat or two, if the cats chose to follow). In this photo are my Boston Terrier (Simon) and Mother’s corgi mix (Bonnie). This photo smells like petrichor, sounds like water and wind and dry leaves and excited dogs, and looks like nostalgia. It feels like silence and loss, and it tastes like I’ve swallowed a memory because I was hungry for time.

In my boggy woods, hidden from the lessons of my parents and their religion, I sprouted. I developed an observational habit of naming and knowing the cottonmouths and the water snakes around the creek, the copperheads and the corn snakes near the edges, the rattlesnakes and the rat snakes under and in the trees. I knew where the gravid females basked and where the hungry youngsters hunted. I knew the woods and the creek because they were my favorite place to be myself. Should a snake have spoken to me, there, I would have eaten without hesitation whatever it offered.

Photo of a non-venomous water snake. The photo is cropped to concentrate on the snake's face, showing the round pupil and lack of a heat sensing pit between eye and nostril. The snake is striped in various shades of brown with vertical stripes on both upper and lower lip. — Photo of a non-venomous water snake. The photo is cropped to concentrate on the snake’s face, showing the round pupil and lack of a heat sensing pit between eye and nostril. The snake is banded in various shades of brown with vertical stripes on both upper and lower lip.

Photo of a cottonmouth (or water moccasin), zoomed in to show the snake's face and head. The cats-eye shaped, vertical pupil is clearly visible, as is the opening of its heat-sensing pit between eye and nostril. These two traits are common to the venomous pit viper family of snakes. — Photo of a cottonmouth (or water moccasin), zoomed in to show the snake’s face and head. The cat-eye shaped, vertical pupil is clearly visible, as is the opening of its heat-sensing pit between eye and nostril. These two traits are common to the venomous pit viper family of snakes.

But the garden snakes, as long as they weren’t venomous, were simply garden snakes. The garden wasn’t my habitat, so I didn’t need to know its snakes. I tended the garden, and ate its tame offerings, with impatient distraction, always longing for the woods.

Here in my middle years, the garden and yard have become my habitat. I no longer visit the woods, except as a tourist. Now I need to name and know the garden snakes.

Other than the practicality and predictability of recognizing our Dekay’s Brownsnake as not-venomous, I can’t put my finger on the reason for my need. It’s not learning, knowledge, or discovery. It’s simply there. As are the garter snakes. The not garter snakes. The Dekay’s Brownsnakes, who, I’m happy to note, are drawn to the yard and garden because they like to eat slugs and snails. Perhaps this is reason enough to name them and to know them?

Photo of the Dekay's Brownsnake, focused on the snake's body scales. Each reddish-brown scale has a raised central keel, like a line drawn the length of the scale. These body scales overlap more tightly than the facial scales. A row of pinpoint black dots is just visible along the snake's back. — Photo of the Dekay’s Brownsnake, focused on the snake’s body scales. Each reddish-brown scale has a raised central keel, like a line drawn the length of the scale. These body scales overlap more tightly than the facial scales. A row of pinpoint black dots is just visible along the snake’s back.

Perhaps it’s all simply my personal gestalt-shift. The vase is Tennessee and the silhouettes are Virginia. The vase is the woods, the silhouettes our yard. The vase is youth, the silhouettes are now. The vase is water snakes, the silhouettes are garden/garter snakes.

Gestalt-shift. (Dare I say paradigm shift? I dare, but shouldn’t. It’s a rabbit hole.) At any rate, it’s another moment of wonder.

Photo of a juvenile snake exploring a mossy corner of the yard. The snake is gray-brown with a pale ring around its neck. Its overlarge eye has a round pupil. I initially leapt to the conclusion that this might be a ring-necked snake, but now suspect it's a young Dekay's Brownsnake. — Photo of a juvenile snake exploring a mossy corner of the yard. The snake is gray-brown with a pale ring around its neck. Its overlarge eye has a round pupil. I initially leapt to the conclusion that this might be a ring-necked snake, but now suspect it’s a young Dekay’s Brownsnake.

Here are links to three reviews of my poetry collection, Watershed:

“The collection focuses on the natural world and the human relationship with nature. …” by Crafty Green Poet (read the full review here)

“The poems have both a logical and mystical aura that keep the reader in place while the poems flow forward. …” by Lynette G. Esposito at North of Oxford (read the full review here)

“Watershed from Kelsay Books is an antidote to compulsion, to insistence, to the headlong rush into the next thing and the next. …” by GriffinPoetry at Verse Image (read the full review here)

I’m grateful for the time that readers, editors, and reviewers have spent with my writing, and with my book. I’ve loved every minute of my writing journey.

Here are a few articles and essays that are more interesting, and more important, than my musings:

Discovered in Collections, Many New Species are Already Gone by Katarina Zimmer at Undark

When Scientists “Discover” What Indigenous People Have Known for Centuries by George Nicholas at Smithsonian Magazine

The history of natural history and race: Decolonizing human dimensions of ecology by Maria N. Miriti, Ariel J. Rawson, and Becky Mansfield at esa journals (Ecological Society of America)

Feds announce plans to begin rescuing sick sawfish amid mysterious die-off by Jenny Staletovich at WLRN 91.3FM

People more often are origin of infectious diseases in animals than vice versa, data suggest by Mary Van Beusekom, MS, at CIDRAP

Ecological countermeasures to prevent pathogen spillover and subsequent pandemics by Raina K. Plowright, Aliyu N. Ahmed, Tim Coulson, Thomas W. Crowther, Imran Ejotre, Christina L. Faust, Winifred F. Frick, Peter J. Hudson, Tigga Kingston, P. O. Nameer, M. Teague O’Mara, Alison J. Peel, Hugh Possingham, Orly Razgour, DeeAnn M. Reeder, Manuel Ruiz-Aravena, Nancy B. Simmons, Prashanth N. Srinivas, Gary M. Tabor, Iroro Tanshi, Ian G. Thompson, Abi T. Vanak, Neil M. Vora, Charley E. Willison, & Annika T. H. Keeley at Nature Communications

living shadows: aesthetics of moral worldbuilding by Brandon at sweater weather (hat tip to Science for Everyone)

Fear and Loathing in Tennessee: Librarians Face Anxiety, Burnout, Job Threats, and Hate Speech Due to Book Challenges and Legislation by Alex Sharp, Jessica McClure, and Cassandra Taylor at Tennessee Library Association

Why flying insects gather at artifical light by Samuel T. Fabian, Yash Sondhi, Pablo E. Allen, Jamie C. Theobald, & Huai-Ti Lin at Nature Communications

Biology Is Not Binary by Kate Clancy, Agustin Fuentes, Caroline M Vansickle, & Catherine Clune-Taylor at American Scientist (another hat tip to Science for Everyone)

‘Brain fog’ is one of Covid-19’s most daunting symptoms. A new study measures its impact by Elizabeth Cooney at STAT

When Horror Is the Truth-teller: It is hard, in the era of the AR-15, to fear a vampire. by Alexander Chee at Guernica

Snakes and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

October 6, 2023November 4, 2023Rae SpencerLeave a comment

I’ve carried this snippet of rhyme my entire life. The rhyme was embossed on a sign in our pediatrician’s office in Huntsville [Alabama], illustrated with two cherubic children, plump and pink-cheeked and aggressively binary.

What are little boys made of?
Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails
That's what little boys are made of

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice
That's what little girls are made of

I despised this rhyme. Little boys got all the fun stuff, and I knew, for certain, that sugar and spice and everything nice were NOT what I was made of.¹

Photo of me at some early elementary school age, posing for one of my oldest sister’s “Rae with Pets” series. Here I’m showing off our first goat, Sandy, a reddish-brown nanny with a short beard and curved horns.

In this blurry middle-school addition to the “Rae with Pets” series, I’m holding one of our red hens. Mother had forced me into a short haircut, for school, because burrs, ticks, and tangles didn’t flatter our household. When I confessed my longing for a feathered Charlie’s Angels look, Mother countered that Farrah Fawcett did not keep “rat nests” in her hair.

Commuters in paradise

We moved from Huntsville to Fayetteville, Tennessee, when I was three years old. I have no reliable memories of being a city kid, of the house Chapman Street where my siblings had friends next door and walked to school. My memories are 20-odd patchwork acres of fields, woods, pens, and sheds. There was an old barn and an older house, and, by the time I was old enough for memories, there were animals everywhere.

Another “Rae with Pets” photo.² This time I’m posing with my brother’s beagle, Fella. A small white hen and a large reddish-yellow rooster have wandered into the frame, along with one of our shepherds in the background.

My memories are also long, diesel-fumed bus rides to and from school, longer drives to the grocery, and longer-yet drives to Huntsville. Because, while our parents moved our household to Tennessee, they never really left Alabama.

The tradition of commuting to Huntsville permeated our life. My oldest brother, 13+ years older than me, finished high school as a commuter student in Huntsville.³ Our father commuted to his bookkeeping and financial analyst jobs for a succession of space industry corporations in Huntsville. We commuted to dog training classes, company picnics, shopping excursions, and dental appointments. And, every time someone got sick, we commuted to the pediatrician’s office.

With five kids spanning the entire realm of K-12, we got sick a lot.

Photo of Mother’s hatchback Toyota Corolla, which logged more than 200 thousand miles before its odometer broke. Before the Corolla there was a maroon Buick Skylark and a classic two-toned station wagon (and probably more I don’t remember). All the cars smelled like migraines, like hot plastic and Mother’s perfume with notes of mildew, ragweed, and gasoline.

I always arrived at the pediatrician in the grip of fever, nausea, and a miserable headache induced by mother’s perfume, a 1970s favorite called Charlie. (Mother “got dressed” for trips to the pediatrician. Thus, Charlie.) The drive took about forty-five minutes each way, long enough to make me car sick on top of whatever ailment prompted the commute.⁴

And there, in the pediatrician’s office, were those insipid caricatures of binary gender. The little boys, with permission to own everything fun in the world. And the little girls, who owned only dresses and aprons and recipes.

Have mercy.

Photo of three very young kittens–one black-and-white, one ginger-and-white, one solid black–huddled together in our front yard. Unless Mother explicitly declared it otherwise, every kitten and cat on our property was mine, mine, mine. Mine to love and spoil and carry in my pockets or down my shirt front or on my shoulder and in my hair. Mine to name and cry over when they were sent away to other homes or died in one of the many tragedies that claim kittens’ lives in rural Tennessee. (The green bicycle in the background was a hand-me-down affair that I was allowed to ride but not own. I can still hear, today, the rattle of its loose fenders and kickstand as I wheezed up and down our gravel driveway.)

Owning too much and too little

Our household was a manifestation of parental dissonance. Mother lived as if entrenched in poverty, while Daddy lived as if money came easy. Both had their reasons.

Daddy worked hard and liked investing in the things he enjoyed. He was a master marksman who bought and sold custom-sighted guns.⁵ We had aquariums in every room, a citizens’ band radio (CB) in every car, a Pong game, and an Atari. These photos exist because we had cameras, film, and an account with the processing lab. Daddy also collected purebred dogs and carried us to obedience trials, most weekends, so the dogs could earn titles. We had beagles, Shetland sheepdogs, German shepherds, and a collie. My oldest sister had a teacup toy poodle. My middle sister had a Siberian husky.⁶

Photo of elementary-school me hugging my father’s Shetland sheepdog, Chisterling’s Dixie Clipper (aka BlackJack or BJ), at a 1970s-era outdoor dog show. I’m sporting a bowl-like haircut and home-sewn clothes: a red hooded shirt and houndstooth-patterned pants. BJ’s red leash matches my red shirt and the red second-place ribbon he earned.⁷

Mother worked hard, too, scrimping and saving and stretching each penny thin. She fed us from the garden, chicken house, and pasture: eggs and tomatoes, okra and beans, chickens she killed and cleaned and plucked, beef Daddy carried to the butcher. She also fed us squirrels and rabbits, when Daddy and/or our brothers hunted, and free government cheese and butter. We had two freezers full of ice-crusted mysteries in tin foil and plastic. She sewed the vast majority of our clothes from clearance bolts of fabric and carefully preserved Simplicity patterns, tsking over mentions of name brands and tutting over complaints about uncomfortably tight cuts that saved precious inches of material.

In short, I grew up in a household of competing parental personalities that reinforced the pediatrician’s binary rhyme, surrounded by Daddy’s largesse and Mother’s frugal home-making.

There was a singular exception to the tension. Both of our parents loved books and vinyl albums, so much so that we had shelves and shelves and shelves, in every room. (We went to the library a lot, but also to used book stores and the sale racks at record shops.)

Photo of elementary-aged me sitting on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my middle sister until our second-oldest brother moved out. I’m petting Daddy’s favorite sheltie, Mac’s Best of Love (aka Bess). The background is cluttered with bunk beds and metal shelving piled high with board games, books, and vinyl story albums.

Thereby Hangs a Tale

My favorite album was and still is Eddy Arnold’s Thereby Hangs a Tale. And, when I was in fifth grade, my love for Eddy Arnold sparked a battle with the pediatrician’s rhyme.

My fifth grade teacher decided our classroom theme, for that year’s Harvest Festival, would be Urban Cowboy. A genuine faux honky-tonk. For a small fee, parents and other visitors to the Harvest Festival could admire our straw bale decorations, enter a raffle to win a real calf (which was penned into a corner of the classroom), and enjoy the spectacle of kids in country-and-western costumes lip syncing our favorite songs.

Photo of fifth-grade me coveting a half-grown Holstein calf that was penned in a corner of our classroom during Harvest Festival. I’m wearing costume vest and chaps (which Mother had made, some years earlier, for my middle sister) over jeans and a white shirt I had already outgrown. A small felt costume cowboy hat hangs on my back.

When the theme was introduced, I knew EXACTLY which song I would perform. Eddy Arnold’s version of Ghost Riders in the Sky. Who needs three Christmas ghosts when you can have a herd of the devil’s cows, chased by the Inferno’s cowboys? I knew every nuance of that song, every change of minor key. It was bound to be a crowd pleaser. (If you haven’t heard it, get thee hence to the internet and listen. I’ll wait…)

Back already? Okay, on with my tale…

The combined and somewhat horrified NO! from Mother and my teacher stopped me short. But okay, if they thought the ghost riders were too much horror for the room, how about the location-friendly Tennessee Stud, from the same album? Nope.

No also to Wreck of the Old 97, to Boot Hill and to Nellie Sits A’Waitin’ and to Tom Dooley and to The Red-Headed Stranger. No to all of them. When I finally got around to asking why, I was floored by the answer.

Eddy Arnold’s voice was a man’s voice. I was a girl.

But I wouldn’t actually be singing, so why did the voice matter? Even if I bowed to Mother’s choice and went with Teresa Brewer, surely no one in the audience would think I actually sang like Teresa Brewer? The conversation turned hostile at that point, on all sides. I declared it was Eddy Arnold or nothing. Mother declared it was Teresa Brewer or else. My teacher declared he had better things to do than explain to me what should already be obvious.

I wasn’t even allowed to resign with my dignity intact, to join my classmates who had opted out of performing. Mother knotted me into my sister’s too-small costume and yanked me up hard when I dared complain, again, about the injustice of it all.

Photo of fifth-grade me doing my best to avoid Mother’s ire as I lip sync Teresa Brewer’s Music! Music! Music!. My most prominent memories from the night are that my clothes were too tight, my sister was mad because I wore her costume, and Mother wanted me to stay within arm’s reach in case I needed another physical reminder that I was a kid and she was an adult. (I did, in fact, receive a number of these reminders as the night wore on. Whether I needed them or not remains up for discussion.)

Memories being what they are, this retelling isn’t accurate. But it’s accurate enough, because the memory isn’t the point. The ensuing years are the point, the escalating Mother-Daughter War. All of the mutual disdain and despair over my clothes and my hair and my aspirations and my hard-headed determination to shun the sugar and spice, the everything nice I was meant to embody, in favor of the snakes and snails and puppy dog tails that were reserved for boys.

Photo of a cottonmouth snake (aka water moccasin). This zoom photo of the cottonmouth’s head shows its vertical “cat’s eye” pupil and heat-sensing pit (between eye and nostril). As a snake-loving girl I learned to spot these distinctive signs of the pit viper family, venomous snakes that shared the habitats I enjoyed exploring. This photo was taken in 2021 at Back Bay Wildlife Refuge, because I still enjoy exploring habitats shared by snakes.

In the part of me that cherishes Mother’s memory, I sympathize with her quest to pave me a feminine path in the world. In the part of me that still chafes from the strain, I regret the energy she invested in shoving me toward her ideal of feminine, while I defiantly shoved back. It was exhausting for both of us.

All because I was assigned female at birth

When it comes to gender, doctors get to make the call. As Kate Bornstein explains:

In most cultures, we’re assigned a gender at birth–and once you’ve been assigned a gender, that’s what you are and always will be. For the most part, it’s doctors who dole out the gender assignments, which shows you how emphatically gender has been medicalized. These doctors look down at a newly born infant and say, ‘It has a penis, it’s a boy.’ Or they say, ‘It doesn’t have a penis, it’s a girl.’ It has little or nothing to do with vulvas or vaginas, let alone DNA, hormones, or dozens of other nuances of biological sex. It’s all penises or no penises: gender assignment is both phallocentric and genital. Other cultures are not or have not been so rigid.
Kate Bornstein in Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Chapter 4, Section 2, paragraph 1)

I was assigned female at birth, and I was pretty much okay with that assignment, on the surface. At least, I didn’t question or resent what being female meant about my body.⁸ What I questioned and resented were the societal (and maternal) expectations around my gender, the insistence that sugar and spice and everything nice should be all I needed or wanted to be.

Have mercy, indeed.

Photo of me as an awkward teenager with a vague hairstyle featuring short, feathered bangs and sides and mullet-like length in the back. I had huge glasses and orthodontic braces. I’m wearing that summer’s favorite long pink T-shirt, a dainty necklace and bracelet, and I’m showing off a king snake I had caught.

I wanted to be made of the tracks wildlife left in the woods. Of horses and goats and cows. Of kitten whiskers and, yes, puppy dog tails. Of snakes and salamanders, weeds and creeks, storms and katydids, stories and books. I read Henry and Ribsy and wanted to be Henry. I read The Black Stallion and wanted to be Alex. I read Where the Red Fern Grows and wanted a pair of hounds so badly I could feel their sleek presence in my dreams.

Photo of my foxhound Sarah. Sarah was the first dog I could call my very own. A friend gifted her to me from a beautiful litter of puppies. I was in college at the time, and I loved Sarah fiercely. I imagined, years ahead, taking her everywhere with me. She died before she was a year old, lost to a careless early morning moment when she got on the road.

Photo of college-age me with my Yorkshire Terrier, Angel. Here, both of us are fresh from cleaning up after some muddy excursion outside. A family friend had show dogs, and, after Sarah died, he gave me Angel. Around one year old at the time, Angel had not done well in shows. For many happy years, Angel did go everywhere with me, usually in my oversized purse.

But I also read The Witch of Blackbird Pond (I wanted to be both Kit and Hannah). And Nancy Drew (I wanted to be George). And the Dragonriders of Pern series (I wanted to be both Menolly and Jaxom). An obscure favorite called Horse in the House by William Corbin (I desperately wanted to be Melly). Even Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (I wanted to be Izzy) hinted that female didn’t have to mean sugar and spice and everything nice.

Photo of young adult me, finally free of the Mother-Daughter Wars, with my pet rat Izzy riding on my shoulder. Izzy was a hooded rat, rescued from the feeder cage of a pet store for $1.50. She had an aquarium-cage in my room, but she liked to ride on my shoulder and play in my hair. It seems Mother was right all along. As soon as I achieved Farrah-length hair, I kept a rat nest in it.

And then I got a chance to define myself

As long as we lived in a stable household, the Mother-Daughter Wars slogged on. Even a few years longer, after the household deteriorated into instability and poverty (the exact poverty she had always anticipated, it seemed), battles would flare. Mother continued her siege of demand and reprimand. I continued my resistance of hide and defy. She told me that my sisters, at least, made the effort. She was correct. They did. I didn’t.

I don’t know how our war would have turned out, had the household remained stable. But our father left, remarried, refused to pay alimony, and changed the life insurance to his new wife’s name mere months before he died. I was fifteen when he died, when Mother caved to the grief that had plagued her since Daddy left and told me she was too tired to raise me anymore. If I needed anything, I should ask my older sisters, and if I didn’t need anything I should simply stay out of the way.

I had outlasted the siege. I was free to dash off into the woods in any spare moment, to read as much as I liked (and as late as I liked, tucked tight under as many cats and dogs as could fit on my bed), to cook and sew only well enough to suit myself, and to wear yesterday’s muddy torn clothes to school if I wanted. It was a lonely relief, but at least it was relief.

In fact, my affinity for snakes and snails and puppy dog tails proved useful.

After Mother shook off her grief and began building a new life, she resumed morning pet duty: putting the dogs into their pens each morning, feeding and watering while I dressed for school. Otherwise I took care of the outside pets. The dogs and I, and whatever cats felt like tagging along, went for long rambles each afternoon. I pulled burrs, brushed or cut out all of our matts, plucked ticks, and watched for signs of injuries or illness. I fed and watered each evening and escorted the dogs to their assigned crates at night. I chased the goats off of the cars and back into their pen, when they broke out or were released for an afternoon, and watched over deliveries of the twin and triplet baby goats that arrived each spring. I emptied and refilled the wading pools that our ducks and geese fouled each day.

Because I was outside anyway, I stacked wood and mowed the yard and helped my oldest sister in the garden. Wielding an old slingblade, I beat back tangles of honeysuckle and stands of ragweed that encroached on the yard. I carried snakes away from the porch, climbed the roof to clean the chimney, and braved the spidery attic to fetch and re-stash boxes. I liked best the dirty jobs, and Mother was content to let me do them. It turns out that, when there’s no man about, girls might need to be more than sugar and spice and everything nice.

*Photo of college-age me with long untidy hair pulled back under a folded bandana. I’m at the kitchen counter, preparing a meal, and there’s a tortoiseshell kitten on my shoulder.*

Between fifteen and twenty-three, I reveled in the freedom I had gained through loss. I graduated high school, and, when I gained control of my own bank account (where Mother had deposited every 4-H prize check I had ever earned) at age 18, I emptied the account to buy a $600 car from my oldest sister’s boyfriend. My middle sister gave me a few unenthusiastic driving lessons, and suddenly I could get myself back and forth to everywhere without begging a ride from sisters and friends. I talked the local veterinarian into hiring me, worked two additional part-time jobs, and did well enough in college to keep the full scholarship I had earned with high standardized test scores. (My test scores did not reflect any particular proficiency or aptitude. I simply had a knack for standardized tests, which played to my strengths of reading, creative puzzle solving in quiet rooms, and informed guesswork when encountering the unknown.)

Year by year, I grew up and moved on. When I finished my bachelor’s degree in biology, I faced a happy pair of choices: should I pursue my snakes and snails onto a biology research path, or should I follow the puppy dog tails into veterinary school? I chose the puppy dog tails. (I won’t claim to have never regretted that choice. Regret is one of my lifelong habits.)

The rhyme stayed with me

I lived in a dorm over the university veterinary clinics, in Knoxville, where I stayed too busy to stew over a childhood rhyme. But the rhyme still surfaced occasionally. Particularly when The Spice Girls were popular. Which was about the same time that I met my rescue tabby, Spice.

Photo of Spice in my dorm. She is standing, front feet braced on the long windowsill that doubled as a bookshelf, peering out of my window over the receiving area for the large animal clinic. She’s wearing a bandage over her shoulders, covering the scabs that prompted someone to drop her off at the small animal clinic as a wounded stray.

The older I got, the less I pondered that rhyme on the pediatrician’s wall. Until recent years. Now I find almost daily reminders of the Mother-Daughter War, of my escape through loss from Mother’s version of female tradition. Of my bittersweet dash away from the siege, toward a future filled with snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.

What if I was a kid again, today? That same kid? Would I be able to make the same escape? I worry that my escape was a fluke, a privileged path through a brief convergence of opportunities.⁹ I worry the future is closing, not opening. Especially for kids who experience a deeper unease, who yearn not just for the other side of the rhyme, but an altogether different definition of gender. I never questioned or resented the gender a delivery room obstetrician assigned me at birth. But what of the kids who did and do?

My memories should stand as old-fashioned artifacts of bygone times. Instead, new generations are experiencing new traumas, inflicted by the polarizing lenses of binary, cisgender ideologies.

What is the deal with gender, anyway?

I’ve yet to find a satisfactory definition of gender. I’m drawn to a quote by Ian Hacking, which wasn’t meant to address gender but seems to fit. Hacking’s words strike a particularly interesting chord, for me, when paired with a quote about capitalism:

High-level semantical words like ‘fact,’ ‘real,’ ‘true,’ and ‘knowledge’ are tricky. Their definitions, being prone to vicious circles, embarrass the makers of dictionaries. These words work at a different level from that of words for ideas or words for objects. For brevity I have called them elevator words. They are used to say something about what we say about the world. Facts, truths, knowledge, and reality are not in the world like protozoa, or being in love. Philosophers keep on fussing with them.
Ian Hacking in The Social Construction of What? (p. 80)

Social theory is often likened to lenses of various cuts that enable us to discern patterns in human action. When the lenses are cut solely to confirm one’s faith and denounce whatever opposes it, the resulting vision is strictly ideological. Such lenses, commonly worn in politics and public debating, function more like blinders.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun in “Getting Real”, the collective conclusion to Does Capitalism Have a Future?

While my experiences and expectations regarding the word gender continue to grow and change, while I claw at my own blinders, I’ve settled into a tentative personal understanding along these lines:

If gender is a genuine trait (that’s a big if), then
it must follow that gender varies, because all traits vary, and
these variations should manifest between a set of extremes
with the vast majority of individuals situated between, rather than at, the extremes.

If gender is a “real” trait, or even a socially constructed one, my experience shouldn’t be unique. In fact, I should be one of the majority who experience our binary-constrained society somewhere between the extremes. And I believe this is the case. I’m clearly not the only girl who despised that dratted rhyme, who dreaded a lifetime of sugar and spice while yearning for snakes and snails. (Nor am I the only girl released from her Mother-Daughter War by household trauma.) None of these constraints were, or are, necessary. A world of binary gender expectations isn’t necessary.

Which is why I wrote this long blog post

It’s worth repeating: My memories should stand as old-fashioned artifacts of bygone times. Instead, new generations are experiencing new traumas, inflicted by the polarizing lenses of binary, cisgender ideologies.

Let me be clear, my years in the Mother-Daughter War are petty spats compared to the abuses endured by many cis women, trans women, and non-binary people. I do not wish to usurp the stories of feminist, trans, and non-binary activists, nor draw attention away from their long struggle. I’ve benefitted from the work of feminist activists, in particular, and I’m grateful. I’ve learned from trans and non-binary advocates and activists, and I’m grateful. I owe my education(s) and career(s) to those who have done the heavy work of changing the world. I’m grateful.

I’m not equipped, emotionally, for a life of activism. But I have a small platform, a great deal of unearned privilege, and a history that seems pertinent to the moment. So I wrote this long blog post. I wrote with the hope that my story might help some mother, somewhere, call a cease-fire in her own Mother-Daughter War and decide, instead, to explore the beautiful territories and rich opportunities between the binaries.

Photo from near the top of our terraced pasture after a brief snowfall. Tire tracks are visible, left by a neighbor’s tractor. A single round bale of hay awaits collection. The neighbor cut and baled the pasture in exchange for all but one or two bales of hay, which we kept for the goats.

Photo from inside “my” boggy acres of Tennessee woods, during winter. There is a thick layer of dead leaves, several nurse logs (downed by a past tornado), and a rich growth of saplings in the tornado-cut spaces. This place was my refuge and heart-home, during my youth and young adult years. I loved these pieces of land as well as I’ve ever loved anyone or anything. They sheltered me through a series of undiagnosed and untreated depressions, and their memory shelters me still.

Notes

1. Please don’t read this to mean that I harbor any resentment against children and adults who are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I grew up with several wonderfully contented sugar and spice and everything nice people, and I’ve met more as an adult. I simply knew, from my earliest knowing, that I was more of a snakes and snails and puppy dog tails kind of person. (click here to return)

2. This photo dates from a mid-elementary-school age. As it was clearly summer, Mother had slackened some of her standards regarding my hair, which is tousled in odd lengths as it recovers from one of the short haircuts. As for the striped halter top and yellow shorts, I inherited some dozen of each as hand-me-downs from my older sisters. Mother sewed them in bulk. (click here to return)

3. Later, my sisters and I commuted to our undergraduate degrees from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I even continued the tradition, for a few years, after moving to Knoxville for veterinary school. Whenever I had a non-working weekend, I commuted four hours “home” to mow the yard or stack wood or mend fences or simply wander the fields and woods until it was time to drive four hours back. The years after I ceased commuting, when I declared somewhere else home, were fraught. Mother resisted and resented my decision to make only infrequent visits. She complained about having to pay someone to mow, about the expense of central heating with no one to stack the wood, and about loneliness. Loneliness, I now understand, was the real issue. I was the youngest child and the last to leave, so I was the one who left her alone. Our mutual insistence on misunderstanding each other’s motivations eventually led to a decade-long breach that never quite healed. (Readers might sense, here, an unhealthy dose of mother-daughter strain. It’s a common enough family dynamic. Read on for more.) (click here to return)

4. Mother probably detested the drive as much as I did, though not enough to transfer our care to one of the family doctors in Fayetteville. And her hard-and-fast rule held that if I was sick enough to miss school (with an undeniable fever and/or vomiting, which were the only acceptable excuses) I was sick enough to see the doctor. (click here to return)

5. Daddy also saved spent brass and reloaded it himself. (click here to return)

6. I was nearing old enough, deemed to be 11 years old for me, when our parents’ marriage fell apart. Daddy had even shopped a bit, with me, for dalmatian puppies. I had read the book at least 101 times. (click here to return)

7. Daddy purchased BJ from a “show quality” litter. I suppose the dream was to expand into the conformation side of AKC shows. To finish a championship and, perhaps, to establish a lineage of champions. (Our father often dreamed big.) But BJ stopped growing just short of breed standard height. He was undersized, a career-ending flaw. Daddy entered him a few times, anyway, bluffing toward standard height with floofy grooming techniques. They even earned a few ribbons and points. But finishing a championship was never a realistic goal. Besides being undersized, BJ was a snappy fellow (stop judging!). He failed many a temperament test, never thrived in the obedience ring, and lived out his life as a grumpy little ornament on our untidy acres. He was Daddy’s dog, but I loved him and he loved me back and we spent many afternoons exploring together. (Especially after Daddy left.) Then many uncomfortable evenings pulling tangles and burrs from our hair. (click here to return)

8. Except that I feared all the ways that my uterus could and did destabilize my life. I’m bookmarking this thought, here, in hopes of expanding it into a separate post, later. (click here to return)

9. I don’t mean to overlook the bizarre irony of seeing my father’s desertion and death, my mother’s exhaustion and grief, as opportunity. There’s a profound dysfunction in my perception of these memories that mirrors the various dysfunctions our family navigated, during those years. (click here to return)

References

Bornstein, K. (2016). Gender outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us. (2nd edition, Kindle edition). Vintage Books.

Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? (3rd printing). Harvard University Press.

Wallerstein, I., Collins, R., Mann, M., Derluguian, G., & Calhoun, C. (2013). Does capitalism have a future? (Kindle edition). Oxford University Press.

I have been saving links to essays and stories more interesting and more important than my musings, but this post is already too long. If you’ve stayed and read to the end, I very much appreciate your attention and time. I’ll add the links to a later (shorter) post.

Twelve Years (and, of course, counting…)

August 18, 2023Rae SpencerLeave a comment

I don’t mark the anniversary of Mother’s car accident every year. In years where the date (today) passes without my noticing how it is today, I congratulate myself. This is not one of those years. This year I’ve noticed. All week.

I’ve noticed, but I can’t say that I’ve wallowed. This feels like an improvement over the wallowing years, though perhaps a step back from the not-noticing years. Maybe each of these years are actually equal, on my journey. Wallowing, noticing, not-noticing, maybe these things say more about growth and time than I’m capable of understanding.

And perhaps these noticings and not-noticings say something about how my mind works, about how it was working (or not working) in those individual years. Perhaps it’s not a complete non sequitur to point out that bee’s toes are much more exciting and interesting than bee’s knees, though the knees tend to get all the memes.

Macro photograph of a bee’s furry leg as it grasps a bright yellow cosmos petal while it is perched to sip nectar. The bee’s foot seems to be made up of three delicate hooked toes, each curled around the edge of the petal, while the bee’s knees appear to be simple hinge joints.

All of these wonderings and maunderings feel somewhat unproductive, but they are sometimes where poems start. So I’m letting myself wonder and maunder.

Macro photograph of a bee collecting pollen and nectar from the tiny yellow flowers of fennel. The black-and-yellow bee has yellow pollen dusting the hairs on its legs, head, and thorax. There’s even a scatter of pollen across the front edge of its wings. Its eyes are large and vaguely reflect the sky and sun, its antennae are long and segmented, and its delicate hooked toes are visible. Its knees are, relatively speaking, unremarkable.

While I’m waiting to see if a poem arrives, it seemed reasonable to update an old entry from April 2012, Finding What I Wasn’t Looking For. (In the post, I talked about Mother’s affinity for four-leafed clovers.) Except somehow, in updating the post (to add photo captions, mostly), I managed to change the post’s date to today. Now I can’t change it back.

Perhaps this, too, says something about how my mind works.

Caught in tangles of tangents

Out of my comfort zone

Sport hunting is a profitable mine, and Mallards are a form of ore

This isn’t about the flight muscles

Except, isn’t it?

Just how big is this business?

How many Mallards are there, anyway?

Where do North American Mallards come from, and where do they go?

Nesting season and shooting season

Harvest by shotgun

Overkill?

The first (documented) North American Mallard bottleneck, circa 1920

A housekeeping note (or, rather, a territory-keeping note)

Preview of Part VI: The US judicial branch decides who owns the Mallards that visit US lands, and funding arrives for conservation

References

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Content warning

Livestock are living stock. And sometimes pets.

Until they are not.

Off to slaughter

Wildlife can also be living stock, to a hunter

Small and sundry prey

Further aside… so many eggs

Gathering the eggs

Breaking the eggs

Growing up in rural Tennessee, eating the animals and dissociating

Depression on top of dissociation

Re-associating, for health reasons

Or, “Thanks for the genes, Dad”

Perseverating on 52

Enter the Mallards

In the next episode…

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A snake by any other name

What goes into a name? Constructing (or deconstructing) Dekay’s Brownsnake

Reconstructing my memory, brown snakes included

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Commuters in paradise

Owning too much and too little

Thereby Hangs a Tale

All because I was assigned female at birth

And then I got a chance to define myself

The rhyme stayed with me

What is the deal with gender, anyway?

Which is why I wrote this long blog post

Notes

References

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