AN INCIDENT AT THE TURTLE POND
OR: Please tell your children to refrain from throwing rocks at ducks ma'am
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Most people who are reading this are probably aware of my sideline as a natural photographer. (Check out my Instagram if you aren’t.) My number one shooting spot is the Turtle Pond on the Salmon Creek Greenway trail, a small pond that is home to a variety of migratory waterfowl, the local heron, a group of turtles, and some other creatures who live there more or less as wild animals.
“More or less” because the pond is affixed to a greenway, which means people are always walking by, which means that they are apt to interact with the animals in unnatural ways. The most common is people feeding the mallards, which is explicitly prohibited by posted signs. But unless you sit someone down and explain why, this prohibition doesn’t necessarily make intuitive sense to someone who is a normal person who just likes cute animals. As a child, I have cherished memories of me and my dad going to Burnt Bridge Creek and feeding the ducks. I get it. You get to see the ducks up close, and they seem to appreciate being fed. But dependence on humans is terrible for wild birds and degrades the environment where they live. If you want to feed an animal or take your kid to feed an animal, go to a petting zoo, not a wild animal habitat. (Crows don’t count, they’re basically human beings at this point. Feed away. They will become your friends and bring you gifts!)
People who know me in person or in my guise as an internet dickhead might think that I relish the opportunity to tell people to stop feeding ducks while I sit at the pond and shoot. I actually really hate confrontations with strangers. When I went canvassing once, I did a HORRIBLE job because the second the person opened the door I wanted to do everything in my power to get them out of this conversation with me as quickly as possible. I have very few compunctions about gunking up familiar social situations but telling strangers what to do just yanks something weird in me that I don’t quite understand.
Especially if they have kids with them. I don’t want to show up some sad sack who’s just trying to do their best! And so, shamefully, if I’m at the pond taking pictures, I will often just lay off the parents who are feeding the ducks or whatever. Maybe I’m a bad conservationist but I’m a feckless little jelly boy and I think it’s time for people to accept and celebrate that about me.
I saw some shit the other day that made me think that maybe it’s time to grow a backbone. While I was at the pond, later than usual (The light was awful but I hadn’t left the house in days-- it’s been raining like a motherfucker in Portland metro as of late), two mothers and a gaggle of their kids-- around five of them, all hovering around 4-7 I think-- posted up at the bench where visitors can sit and watch the ducks. The small pack of kids immediately proceeded to take turns picking up rocks from the area where the concrete path turns into the dirt slope that dips into the pond and heaving them at a group of mallards, one after another.
I was dumbfounded. Not by the kids. Kids are shitheads who don’t understand cause and effect. But by these two mothers, just sitting there yakking away while their kids threw rocks at living creatures just vibing in their habitat. Sooner or later, they did look up and talk to their kids about the ducks, not to say, “hey stop tossing rocks at those ducks,” but to ask gathered children if they could identify which ducks were boys and which were girls. Every time I see parents going out of their way to discuss and confirm something’s gender with their children, I assume they are using gentle rhetoric to reinforce The Binary, really drill down deep in their kids that some things are boys and some things are girls, and it’s the primary thing you NEED to know about them because it is an immutable fact of nature that should reinforce your ideological about how people are supposed to act for the rest of their lives. No one ever heard of a gender reveal before mainstream thinkers started saying Judith Butler stuff in public, and now one of these stupid things starts a wildfire once a month every summer. Deeply unfair to put this on these people, but also they were letting a bunch of kids throw rocks at ducks so I don’t really feel that guilty about assuming they are propagandists in the gender war.
I know I should do something. I know I should walk up to these ladies and quietly say hey, maybe don’t let your kids do that. The ducks are my friends and I am being a coward. But, I just… sit. I’m glued. Dumbfounded. This has to stop soon, right? This is so fucking crazy but the kids or have to eventually either get bored or recognize that those ducks aren’t there to get rocks thrown at them or the parents have to look up say what the hell, stop doing that, they’re just there to, like, be ducks. Nibble at water and quack and shit. But it… just… doesn’t… stop? I felt like I was sitting there for ten minutes, just waiting for something rational to happen.
But the marble just refused to slide down the chute.
A hero strolled around the corner. He was a beefy man with a baseball cap on. He yelled the words we all needed to hear in that surreal moment: “HEY! ARE YOU THROWING ROCKS AT THE DUCKS!? STOP IT!”
The kids did not stop. They were not beholden to this man, any more than they were beholden to the general vibe that suggested that maybe they shouldn’t throw rocks at ducks. One of the mothers responded.
“Oh come on, they’re not throwing rocks at the ducks!”
“Yes they are!” The beefy man replies.
“Yeah, they are,” I say. This man has my back. We are brothers now, dudes bonded in stopping rock.
“Well it’s not like they’re gonna HIT one!”
The rocks were actually getting pretty close to those ducks. But even then, the point, for you, should probably be to not raise kids who routinely throw rocks at wild ducks. I can’t even imagine what their neighborhood crows are saying about these little rock tossing demons. Remembering their faces, plotting revenge.
The man is more irate about this now, because instead of saying, “My darling children, listen to your beloved mother… please stop trying to dome the ducks,” she has instead opted to defend her children in this insane pastime.
“Stop throwing rocks at the ducks!” He yells again.
She is unnerved now. “You are being way too aggressive! They are four and five years old!” She is not actually mad on the children’s behalf. They are fine. They are still throwing rocks at ducks, so I think it’s safe to assume that they’re not scared of this guy or of me. She is actually panicking about someone talking to her about her bullshit parenting, and then insisting that her anxiety is actually that of her children.
This is the only rhetorical weapon a maleficent parent has in their sling. “You’re telling me that I’m fucking up? Well buddy guess what… you’re trying to beat the shit out of my kids!” It was a little like watching those parents who show up to school board meeting and screech “Stop teaching my kids that slavery was bad” into a little microphone. The miracle of giving bird allows you to reframe your anxieties as those of your children then get mad when someone tells you it’s fucking nonsense.
I speak. “Yeah, and you’re letting them throw rocks at birds!”
One of the kids, a towheaded one, speaks. “They’re not birds, they’re ducks!”
I look at the child and speak to him in a non-threatening, sing-song voice. “A duck is a bird!”
“I KNOW THAT!” He says. Then he did a little spin.
Around this point these weird moms finally intervene and tell the kids to stop playing Missile Command against mallards. They leave soon after, fresh out of activities, now that someone has told them to stop throwing rocks at wild animals. I took a few more pictures and walked home.
(All pictures from the night when this happened. Wednesday, I think.)