The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Where did I get this bracelet? It's a long story.

Curiosity killed the cat. I never heard exactly how. But The History of Borough Fen Decoy,  written by Tony Cook & R.E.M. Pilcher, explains how curiosity killed a lot of ducks. With the help of some dogs.

A decoy, in this sense, is not a fake duck meant to encourage real ducks to fly down and join it. It's a carefully designed pond with curved arms, meant to encourage ducks to hang out there in large numbers – and occasionally get netted at the end of an arm, also in large numbers. In the 1804-5 season they trapped “450 dozen and 8” ducks at Borough Fen Decoy. They sent those 5,408 ducks to be sold in London. You could make a lot of money with a decoy, and there were hundreds in England and Ireland, in suitable areas, such as the Fens.


                       (After Anne Treadwell-Cook, in Cook & Pilcher.)

They seem to have been invented in the Netherlands, and brought to the UK by the enterprising Sir W. Wodehouse, who lived in the early 1600s. (Surely a relative of the brilliant P.G. Wodehouse.) “Decoy” is an Anglicisation of “Eend-kooi,” which means “duck-trap.” Knowledgeable types, decoymen, would just call it a coy. Or kooi, if they were knowledgeable Dutch types.

The arms, or “pipes,” of the decoy are covered with high archways of local reeds, a pleasantly rustic effect. The banks are gently sloped, perfect for resting on while you doze or rearrange your plumage, if you are a duck. At the end it is a giant tunnel-net. There are reed screens along one side of the pipe, so you can sneak along without being seen by the ducks, if you are a decoyman. The screens have gaps between them, and are fanned, so “The final effect is that of a Venetian blind laid half-open on its side”.

                (Ineptly, after Anne Treadwell-Cook, in Cook & Pilcher.)

The pond is shallow, so as not to encourage diving ducks, which can get away too easily and which are considered inferior eating. It is kept clear of reeds, to discourage ducks from skulking there, and its banks are steep and uncomfortable.

The simplest way to catch ducks in a decoy is to notice that there are a bunch of ducks relaxing in one of the pipes, probably because you laid out a nice duck-food buffet there the night before. (You selected the pipe in accordance with the wind direction, since ducks don't like to take off with the wind behind them.) You suddenly pop out from behind a screen near the mouth of the pipe, the horrified ducks flee down the pipe, you bound along and pop out at the next gap, chasing them, and they fly into the net or “bunch huddled together,” at the end. A twist of the net traps them all. Because of the Venetian blind effect, ducks in the pipe could see you, but ducks in the pond could not.

But often the ducks don't go far enough into the pipes to make this a fruitful endeavor, even though food is there. This is where the dog comes in. Instead of scaring ducks further down the pipe with the sight of your ghastly self, you entice them into the pipe by giving them glimpses of the dog. You send the dog over a low “dog-jump” between screens, and it runs down the bank of the pipe and disappears over the jump behind the next screen.

Wak? What was that? The ducks swim a little further down the pipe, stretching their necks to see what's going on. Wak?

Meanwhile you sneak behind the screen and signal the dog to go over the next jump at the right moment. The ducks pursue. Wak! Wak! Did you see that?

Wak! I saw it again! Hurry! Wak wak wak!

When the ducks are far enough down the pipe, you show your scary self, the ducks panic and rush down the pipe, and are netted as before.

Why do the ducks follow the dog? One explanation is that they are curious. They want to know more. Animals generally want to know what is going on in their world. Plains Indians used to lure pronghorns within arrowshot by lying in tall grass and waving a stick with a cloth on it. The antelope just had to find out what that thing was.

And if there's a predator sneaking around it would be nice to know what kind of predator it is and where and what it's doing. Traditionally decoy dogs are supposed to look like foxes – small, ginger-coated, bushy-tailed dogs. (Tradition has been flouted by the use of yellow labs, white terriers, and “a large Newfoundland-type” dog. Also a cat. Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey experimented with a rabbit, a ferret, and a monkey he borrowed from an organ-grinder. But you should use a small ginger dog and you should name it Piper.)

More than curiosity, the ducks may feel the urge to mob the probable predator. When animals mob a predator, they surround it in a crowd, make as much noise as they can, and maybe peck at it. This might seem risky, but it's common. If you hear a tremendous shrieking of birds in the forest, you may find a cloud of small birds mobbing a hawk or an owl. The hawk or owl is made miserable and knows it has no chance of taking any prey creature by surprise, so it flies off, pursued by shrieks. At my sister's farm the guinea fowl have been heard and seen mobbing a bobcat and a coyote, each of which ran away. So the ducks in the decoy may be planning to catch up with that dog or fox or whatever it is (that can't be a monkey? – wak!) and hassle it. They would wave pitchforks if they could.

Most decoys are long gone. Borough Fen hasn't been used to catch ducks for sale since the early 1950s. The Wildfowl Trust, under famous ornithologist Sir Peter Scott, turned it into a bird-ringing station. Ducks are caught, banded, and released, in the pursuit of knowledge about their migrations. Cook and Pilcher proudly write “There is one recovery of a Teal from Turkey.”

The decoy doesn't work as well when ornithologists run it. The trouble is that banded ducks remember. They hang about near the mouth of the pipe making worried noises. They won't go in, and other ducks, “sensing the disquiet of their experienced fellows,” also become unenthusiastic. Major criminals have a rule: Leave No Witnesses. This is probably why we don't know what happened to that cat.

I certainly hope you brought enough for everybody

Long long ago, people brought dingoes to Fraser Island, a big sand island off eastern Australia. The dingoes went wild and self-supporting. Nowadays, dingoes in most of Australia have had the chance to breed with more recently imported dogs. (Don't get silly. I do not speak of the dingopoo, the cockadingo, the dreaded dingohuahua.) The Fraser dingoes are among the purest old dingo stock, so dogs are forbidden on the island.

Photograph by ogwen, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Fraser Island is in Queensland. It has miles of shimmering beaches, a hundred lakes of pure fresh water, and lofty, ferny rainforest, so a third of a million people drop by each year.

Tourists, and some of the few hundred people who live on Fraser, sometimes feed the dingoes. Authorities advise against feeding dingoes. Residents say they can handle themselves around dingoes. But in 2001 dingoes killed a 9-year-old whose family was camping there. To protect both humans and dingoes, the government shot some of the bolder dingoes and built sturdy dingo fences, surrounding areas where people live. Many island residents protested, finding the fences destructive, annoying, or pointless.

Several nonfatal dingo attacks have occurred just outside the fences. In April, Mike West, of Birds Queensland, said that goannas – huge, speedy, monitor lizards, (Varanus) – are multiplying dangerously because of the dingo policy.

“We're up to our armpits in bloody great big goannas at Kingfisher Bay and Eurong because there's no dingoes inside the fences to chase them off,” West told the Courier-Mail. (I found this story on the comprehensive website herper.com.)

Goannas can get nearly seven feet long. They can harm people, although they are unlikely to try to eat us because they cannot swallow us whole. Their bite may be a little bit venomous. Apparently, many people who are not bothering goannas get injured while watching someone else bother a goanna. The goanna lashes its huge tail, and bystanders suffer. That's not all. “Alarmed goannas can mistake standing humans for trees and attempt to climb off the ground to safety, which is understandably painful, as well as distressing for both man and beast,” according to Wikipedia.

John E. Hill, GNU Free Documentation License 1.2

West told of being personally menaced by goannas. “I got chased by one and had to drop an Esky on it. It's the same problem as dingoes. They are not frightened of people.” (An Esky is a cooler, sometimes even an Eskimo brand cooler.)

In lots of places goannas have learned that people have food, either food which they will give a hungry lizard, or which a hungry lizard can just help itself to. Authorities advise against feeding goannas.

Frank P. Mahoney

West says the dingo fencing has been a failure, and should be scrapped. Inevitably, he says, a tourist will get bitten by a goanna. “Are they going to start shooting goannas next? They've already shot kookaburras for pecking people and they are trying to trap a crocodile off Fraser. Where's it all going to end?”

Authorities say they are reviewing dingo management strategy. In the meantime, they advise against feeding wildlife. Recently, a litter of dingo puppies was discovered underneath the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service headquarters. They are insanely cute. Malcontents suggest the rangers are... feeding them.

I long to travel to Fraser Island to view wildlife. I will join the other tourists balanced on top of the sturdy government fence, with dingoes eyeing us from one side and goannas from the other, and all of us keeping an eye cocked to the sky for flocks of killer kookaburras. Look for me there! I'll be wearing body armor and a NO DINGOHUAHUAS T-shirt, and I'll be carrying a picnic basket.

Dancing with Bubbles

For  a story on a pit bull rescue organization, I was visiting Kim Ramirez. Kim has two dogs, and she was fostering a third, Spyder, a worried young dog who had been confiscated from the Michael Vick dog-fighting operation. I was there to meet Spyder, since the Vick dogs were celebrities. I also met the other two, Nala and Ross. Ross is a 60-pound pit bull mix, white with brindle spots, with a classic Hello-I-love-you pit bull bonhomie. Kim adopted him after the organization rescued him from the shelter. (Shelters overflow with unwanted pit bulls.)

In order to have a place for three big dogs, Kim and her daughter live in a mostly industrial neighborhood, on the outskirts of town.

After we talked about Spyder (who had retired to her crate to avoid stressful media attention), Kim showed me Ross's favorite game. We were in the kitchen, late afternoon sun leaning through the window. She got out a bottle of bubble-blowing liquid and blew a plume of bubbles. “Touch!” she said.

Ross was delighted. He leapt into the air, catching bubbles. He flung himself clear off the floor. He twisted, trying to grab more than one bubble per leap. He jumped again and again, leaving no bubble unpopped. He looked at Kim hopefully – more bubbles? More bubbles?

She blew more bubbles and Ross jumped for them, even the tiny ones.

The pit bull rescue story was fascinating to research. There was a lot to learn, about dog fighting, dog breeding, dog rescue, and dog politics. Some of it was very sad. Some of it was encouraging. There was no space in the article for Ross.

But the image that keeps coming back to me from that story is of Kim, and a big pit bull in a sunny kitchen jumping like a trout to catch bubbles.

A Bird for Each Shoulder

Sometimes people get sentimental about the nobility of animals. But it depends on the animal. Perhaps you saw the story of Yosuke, a pet African Grey parrot in Japan. One day he got out. As parrots do, he flew around for a few days and a few miles before landing and seeking human help. (“Free! I'm free! I can go anywhere I want! I fly, I soar! -- Hey, where am I? Where is everybody? Where's lunch? Oh no! Lost! I'm lost!)

The police picked up the bird, and an officer tried to chat, but the parrot wouldn't speak. He was deposited at a vet clinic, and after a while he opened up. “I'm Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” he confided. He gave his address. The vet told the police, who found that yes, there was a Nakamura family at that address who had lost their bird. They said they'd been drilling Yosuke for two years on how to ID himself. (Smart. I never even thought of teaching my cockatiel, “I'm Ms. Beak-of-Steel McCarthy.”)

Mr. Nakamura contrasts with the last talking bird I read about in the news, a blue-and-gold macaw at a wildlife sanctuary in Warwickshire. Barney, formerly a lorry-driver's pet, is a classically foul-mouthed parrot who is no longer allowed to meet the public after telling “the local mayoress to f*** off.” He cursed some children. He cursed the vicar. Like Yosuke, he doesn't trust law enforcement, and told two police officers, “You can f*** off too, w******!”

Those asterisks were in the original. I am a simple natural history buff and can only guess what they stand for.

Two African Greys at the sanctuary have picked up these effective phrases from Barney. The Daily Mail reported that sanctuary owner Geoff Grewcock says the three birds sit around swearing. “It sounds like a builder's yard, with all the abuse flying about.” A fourth bird, Sunny, shrieks “Shut up!” when the cursing starts, but they ignore him.

According to the Sun, Grewcock hopes to clean up Barney's conversation by making him listen to documentaries and “posh Radio 4.” As a simple American, I can't even guess what that means Barney will be saying next.

The contrast between nasty rowdy Barney and articulate well-informed Mr. Yosuke Nakamura reminds me of a dog encounter I witnessed. On Market Street in San Francisco, a woman with a white cane was led along the sidewalk by a guide dog, a golden lab. They were near the curb when a pickup truck pulled up at a red light. Two dogs in the back of the truck glanced down, saw a dog below, and instantly began barking loudly. (“Hey! A******! Get away from our truck! Back off, flea-bus!”)

The startled guide dog, suddenly assaulted by hostile sound from above, shrank in terror. The woman with the cane knelt and put her arms around him as the dogs in the truck kept yelling. The driver of the truck looked back, saw what her dogs were doing, and started frantically banging on the back window, yelling at them to stop. Her dogs, encouraged that she was joining the ruckus, barked even harder. (They could have used a bird like Barney to ride shotgun.) Finally the light changed and the truck drove away.

The hard-working guide dog, who had devoted his life to service, stood on the sidewalk trembling. The idlers in the truck, loudmouth jerks who threatened others for the fun of it, zoomed off into the West, probably congratulating each other on effective pack-work and flinging beer bottles into the gutters.

It was a moral scene suitable for a Hogarth engraving. (Okay, I know, like I spend so much time looking at engravings. It would be perfect for Goofus and Gallant.)