Editorial: Aggressive duck mating behavior nothing to shake a stick at...

Aggressive duck mating behavior nothing to shake a stick at...|

“How would you like to have sex and get kicked in the head?”

On behalf of the entire population of the Sonoma Valley I’m going to go out on a limb here and say: “No, we wouldn’t like that.”

But that was indeed the question posed by Jeff Stuhr at the Sonoma City Council meeting Monday night, after the Sonoma resident used his allotted three minutes of public-comment time to spin a wanton tale of passion, violence, heroism and lust. And ducks.

It all started last week, when Stuhr and a friend were enjoying a quiet afternoon on the Plaza - when suddenly sounded a woman’s emphatic calls of “Rape! Rape! Rape!”

The two men turned to face whatever vile specter had infiltrated our once-safe community only to find, in the words of Stuhr, “three ducks having sex.”

Now, anyone remotely familiar with the Sonoma Plaza duck “lifestyle” - or, the mating habits of Anatidae - would think the woman had gone, er, daffy.

Here’s how Stuhr described the unnerving scene: A pair of women, offended by a pair of randy drakes forcing their maleness upon a female duck, began kicking the mallards de sade, if you will, and hitting them with large sticks.

“She kicked one of the ducks three feet in the air!” said Stuhr, piquing the interest of everyone in the council chambers (and any Niners scouts in attendance).

And then things got aggressive. Stuhr’s buddy steamed over to the women to defend the fervid males, only to have one of the women’s own fervid male companions rush to her defense. In the end it took a pair of Sonoma’s Finest to bring the melee to its conclusion.

After the dust and feathers had settled, the police learned the women were in town from Georgia, where apparently duck courting traditions aren’t as primitive (we’re told Savannah-area drakes still bathe in lye soap and don their Sunday Best).

But this type of animal-kingdom misunderstanding is exactly why Stuhr addressed the council in the first place - to suggest the city disperse some educational materials around the Plaza about duck mating habits (or, “orn porn,” as one birding wiseacre put it). And while we’re probably not quite ready to post beware-of-sex-crazed-duck signs on the Plaza horseshoe yet - “Ducks Xing/ Ducks XXXing” would get my vote - it probably would be beneficial if people were keyed in about the darker side of Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Because, as Sally Schloss, of WebVet.com puts it, “male ducks are the rapists of the bird world.”

Schloss says that, while male and female ducks pair up like other bird species, in the duck world males don’t stick around to help with the kids and, therefore, their biological programming isn’t geared toward protecting the mother. Rather, it’s all about scouting out their next conquest - which makes, as Schloss bluntly puts it, “any female fair game.”

As horrendous as this sounds for our fairer feathered friends, it’s the result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary biology - meaning it seems to work pretty well for the species, and any ornithological intervention now is pretty much a waste of time.

As it is, I think Stuhr said it best: “I like these ducks; it isn’t appropriate to have people hitting them with sticks.”

Still, we wouldn’t blame anyone who witnesses the caddish behavior of male ducks to turn Daffy’s words against him:

“You’re deth-picable!”

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