Some people shoot them. Some people photograph them. Some people eat them. Peking (Beijing?) duck. Duck a l'orange. Brome duckling.

Me? I don't shoot ducks, don't photograph ducks, don't eat ducks. I just like to see them.

The first time it dawned on me that I liked ducks was on a weekend spent in Paris, half a lifetime ago.

It's highly unlikely that most tourists visit Paris just to watch ducks. Were I a member of the betting fraternity, the temptation to wager that the foregoing assertion is factual in all respects would be irresistible. As an aside, why is it that the resistible temptations do not hold the same attraction as the irresistible?

Anyway, not to put too fine a tooth in it, in fact no tooth whatsoever, a family of ducks on the River Seine, on the right fork passing Notre-Dame Cathedral, captivated my attention.

I was seated in a touring water taxi. The guide was extolling the architectural magnificence of the cathedral. As he spoke, his left arm pointed to notable sites on the left bank, his right arm to the other bank. Just as a conductor draws the undivided attention of the members of a symphony orchestra, the eyes of my fellow tourists followed the guide's sweeping arm movements, to left, to right, sometimes dead ahead.

Somehow my attention wandered, and there, to the left of the boat I spotted a family of French ducks serenely swimming in formation, oblivious to the sights and sounds of the great city that lay all around, the cathedral, the guide boats, the noise of traffic, the fevered humanity of people desperate to cram in every possible attraction within their allotted forty-eight hours before hustling on to their next destination, by bus, plane, car.

Brown ducks. They were there before the river was penned within walls, there before the great cathedral itself was built, there before Caesar trampled Gaul into submission, there before the time of the druids. And, if not poisoned by pollution, they will still be there after I and my fellow tourists have crumpled into dust and only the vaguest outline of what was once a great building, a great city, remains to tempt future archaeologists to seek meaning in the buried remnants.

The sight of that family of ducks has remained indelibly impressed in memory. Wild life in the city. Unperturbed. Oblivious of man and his works.

Today I saw another family of ducks, on another river, in the heart of another city on another continent, swimming in formation, breaking off to dive tipsy topsy in search of edible weed. This was in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and the river the Rideau. They, too, ignored the city and its inhabitants. They were living as their kind had lived for untold ages. They were here before Colonel By, before Champlain, even before the original inhabitants, the true Canadians, the native aboriginals.

The memory of my ducks on the Seine was kindled afresh. I stopped to watch them. They paid no attention. Why should they? Their ancestors were here before my kind. Their descendants, unless poisoned by pollution, will outlast my kind.

Ducks in the midst of a great city have that effect. The city may be Paris, Ottawa, or Dublin where ducks inhabit the pond in St. Stephen's Green. They deserve respect. They deserve the right to inspire such musings.

A fellow townsman of mine, the poet William Allingham, was inspired by such a sight to pen the following gloss that appears and reappears in anthologies the world over.

Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing:
What a little thing
To remember for years--
To remember with tears!

The End