DONALD AND DAISY, You Little Bastards.......

The pale fingers of dawn are creeping around the edges of my curtains as something awakens me. I check my phone. There is a message from the Baby Angel many thousands of miles away in the UK so I exchange a few thoughts with her in the thinning gloom.

It is still quite dark when I heard the first quack.
"Hey, I hear quacking" I type. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and shrug on the sky blue fleece dressing gown that will not wear out. Padding through the darkened corridor, lit by the glow of my phone, I make my way to the back door and peer through the glass to see if I can see the telltale silhouette of a bobbing head.

He (or she) is right there. Poised on one leg on the wall between spa and pool, its shadowy outline clear in the burgeoning morning.

The little bastard.

Bearing in mind the earliness of the hour, I employ only a partial version of my tried and true method, leaping across the patio, vaulting up the stairs and stamping my feet on the wooden deck. The duck slips into the water and hastily makes for the other shore. I race for the long handled pool scoop and wave it savagely at the slightly nervous looking creature who simply paddles off in another direction. I give chase; it redirects. I redirect; it paddles faster, just out of reach of my pole. I forget the hour and ROAAAAAAARRRRRRR like a beast.

"GET OUT OF MY POOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!"

The duck takes off in a whirr of wings and I settle back to still my heart.
No really, I am a bit out of breath.

I reach for my phone. As I am reporting the incident to the BA, another duck (paler, smaller) plops into the water beside me. BLOODY CHEEK!

I employ my methods again but this time the creature squawks furiously and shakes its feathery little tail insolently at me, lifting off the water for a few feet and landing again amidst a flurry of splashing and flapping. I swipe, it lifts and lands. I swipe it lifts and lands in the spa. I swipe again, roaring all the time; it lifts and performs a series of landings all the way across the pool with my scoop millimetres from its fluffy arse...rather like chasing a skimming pebble. Finally, it gives up and takes off proper, quacking indignantly all the while. I skid to a halt and realise I have broken out in a sweat; my heart is hammering and I have no further need of exercise for the day. I may also have pulled a hammy.

Quickly reporting my exploits on the phone to the BA, who is warm and comfortable on the sofa in England, I become aware, in the rapidly growing light, that Duck 2 has not gone far. It is up on the next level, near the shed, lurking. Waiting. Hovering like a vulture over the gasping breaths of an expiring animal (That would be my gasping breaths as I get my pulse rate down). I throw myself up the next flight of stairs, waving my stick again, and it saunters off behind the shed. I race back down the steps to retrieve some decorative stones from around the asparagus fern. Lobbing a few, ineffectively, behind the shed, I am satisfied to hear some scuffling and then stillness. I think it went over the fence. Or under. Pretty sure my girlie stone throwing had nothing to do with it though.

Returning poolside I station myself on the spa with pool scoop by my side.

YOU SHALL NOT LAAAAND!

A whirr of wings as the second duck buzzes me from overhead, on its way north.

Duck Wars

At this time of my life, when so much is going on, I would expect that I should have been writing here more frequently when, in fact, the reverse (obviously) is true.

There is so much to say about our family and the trauma and angst that we are suffering in the teen years; about the business and where it is going; about the house and the windfall and the decisions we are trying to make....but all I can tell you about are the ducks in our pool.

Anyone who follows us on facebook will have seen evidence of the proximity of local wildlife to our backyard. In the past we have had to deal with snakes (plural), koalas and the ubiquitous ducks. The ducks are particularly irritating because they are hard to deter. I mean, squirt a koala and it will eventually get the message, block up all the snake entries and there will eventually be a thick line of ants marching into the subterranean coffin and back out the other side. Ducks are different. For a start, they use the water as a means of defence and when I say 'the water' I actually mean, 'our reluctance to get into the water'! Three of us can stand on three sides of the pool, shouting, hollering and hitting the water with sticks and the confounded ducks will position themselves in the centre of the pool, equidistant from all their antagonists. Unreachable unless you fancy a dip! Himself has taken to heaving chunks of wood, from the woodpile, at the offending critters.

Which brings us to recent events. Usually, through the winter, the ducks do a bunk and we are poop free on the sides and bottom of the pool. Come Spring, the bas***** return and Himself oils up his pitching arm ready to discourage them from making our pool 'home'. The other night, seeing an offending duck in the pool again, Himself went hooting and hollering up the back steps, reaching for his trusty block of wood. Just as his hand drew back behind his head to pitch the log at the offending mallard, she made a dash for the middle of the pool; her sides seemed to explode and a flock of tiny ducks streamed behind in her wake! There were 12 of them!!

The duck hating centre of my granite exteriored husband melted.

The following night, after a flurry of 'how do I get rid of them' posts on facebook, the BA and I went up to the pool to view the bebes. (Duck poop aside, they really are pretty cute). But the BA being 17 and slightly hormonally brain dead decided that she wanted to pick one up. Despite all our protests that the mother duck wouldn't let and and never mind that but you shouldn't handle wild babies or the mother will abandon them etc etc etc, she decided that the best way to collect a duckling for petting was to scoop one up with the pool scoop/net thing.

Well, you can imagine how that went.

It was pretty spectacular I have to admit. The mother duck rose up to her full height, flapping her wings aggressively and practically jumping into the net; the babies shot off in 400 different directions like a starburst of slippery black beaked tadpoles. Within 4 seconds they had regrouped under mother's wings, untouched but possibly extremely traumatised. OK then, definitely extremely traumatised.

Himself was horrified. The man who had routinely been throwing large hunks of wood at ducks for the past 2 months pointed the accusing finger at the BA and I.
"Don't you realise that if you had caught one, the mother wouldn't have anything more to do with it?" he enquired furiously.
I thought of the effing and blinding which normally accompanies the arrival of ducks in our pool, the curses associated with scrubbing off duck poop and my husband's general lack of love for ducks and I said....
"So?"

The next day we saw no ducks.

"That's it!" Himself grumbled accusingly, "you've scared them off...."
(??????????????????????????)

The following day mother duck was back but......gasp.......there were only three ducklings left. Himself followed her as she took them for a walk, out onto the street (whizzz...beeeeeeeeeep) and over to the other side where she proceeded to walk up an extremely steep set of stairs. One little fellow made it up behind her but the other two were left, leaping and peeping at the bottom of the edifice.
"Well," he said,"if that is the way she's going to care for them, no wonder she only has three left!"

But he still wouldn't let us throw anything at them.

We may be scrubbing duck poop off the pool for a very long time.........