Out for a duck in a losing battle against nature |
The insurgents use the cover of darkness, arriving just after the sun has set or in the half light before it rises. Elaborate countermeasures to thwart their infiltrations have failed.
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Chemical warfare has been tried. Terrifying decoys deployed. Complex aerial defence systems installed. Even lasers. All to no avail. In this asymmetrical battle, the insurgents are winning - much to my amusement.
They're not Fidelistas, FARC or Fretilin; they're Australian wood ducks and they have my neighbour stumped as he tries everything to keep them off his pool - and their droppings out of it.
"I put a blow-up crocodile in there," he told me. "Went out the next day and 10 ducklings were using it as a jumping platform." When he tried to shepherd the little ones out of the pool area, the mother duck flew at him, prompting gales of laughter from his wife.
He's tried a chemical duck repellent. It didn't work either. The plastic owl which sits on the pool fence? As useless as an ashtray on a motorbike.
A few weeks back, when a tall orange pole appeared in his backyard, I thought the neighbour had taken a new interest in ham radio and installed an antenna. Not so. He pointed to the raptor shaped kite attached which he was told would finally deter the ducks. It didn't.
The latest weapon is a rotating laser, which flashes an eerie green light over the pool and into the trees. I'm not sure how the neighbourhood possums are coping but the ducks seem as nonchalant as ever. Laser schmaser.
"The bloke who lent it to me did warn that if they were 'generational' ducks there's little hope of ever deterring them," he said, somewhat deflated, when I asked if the laser had worked.
They're certainly generational, the wood ducks around here. I've watched them over the years I've lived here. They roam over the lawns and settle on the pools in the neighbourhood as if they own the joint.
In winter, you can hear their distinct calls from high up the trees where they........