The Rooftop Duck

A true story about an invasive species

Image: photograph of a Muscovy duck and her ducklings

The situation: I am, nominally, an environmental scientist. I did the capstone project of my degree on cataloging the urban invasives – plants, animals – that have been wreaking havoc on the few natural areas of South Florida not already paved into oblivion.

There’s a duck on my porch.

The duck: Muscovy. Invasive.

She has laid eleven eggs in the ceramic pot that houses the decrepit skeleton of my mother’s late lemon tree. She’s on my apartment porch, four stories above the canal with no clear way down.

The choice: I considered taking the eggs and freezing them before she started to brood them. Why? It was a practical choice. I don’t believe that an undeveloped fertilized egg is a living animal. Stick them in the freezer, stop them developing, no harm done. Let them develop, and then when they hatch, I have eleven ducklings suiciding off the edge of my porch as soon as they’re able to waddle. Their mom didn’t understand gravity when she laid them safely in the cool, dark, dead lemon pot.

My mother, inspired by a video online, suggested rigging up some kind of bucket to lower them to the ground. This idea troubled me. So much effort to ensure the release of invasive animals into our canal. Would we not be culpable, then, in the destruction radiating out from them – tiny, in the grand scheme, but part of a pattern that is so large and so monstrous.

We discussed. We decided to freeze the eggs. Either eleven things die or nothing dies.

And the mother duck comes back one day to an empty pot. Maybe she’s heartbroken. I don’t know if she’s capable of that. If the eggs disappeared, I don’t even know if she would remember they were there – if she has the capacity for memory. She has invested a great deal of energy in the eggs, and losing them is a blow to her – but I don’t know if she would care, or if she would just move on and go back to dabbling in the canal. Do you know anything about duck sex, anyway? These birds are constantly raping each other. I don’t know if this duck wanted the mating that led to the creation of these eggs or if she was hurt. She certainly doesn’t understand the cause and effect. But I do. And I need to believe that ducks are not capable of trauma. I need to believe that in order to believe that the universe is kind and in order to take any delight in seeing rows of ducklings peeping across the road in the spring. It’s funny and it’s not funny at all. I used to feel bad throwing garbage away because I thought it would hurt its feelings. How am I supposed to live in a world where female ducks can be traumatized?

I don’t know what she feels. Her face is blank and her eyes are wide, black, and empty. She hisses when I come too near the dead lemon pot.

The first thing you learn in any biology class is that the road of evolution is paved with dead baby birds. They’re a delicious meal, and not only that. Egrets kill or fatally neglect babies that hatch only a day later than their eldest sibling. Generations of baby birds, thrown away as unneeded backups. Biological trash. I prefer freezing a few eggs to dooming eleven tiny nuggets to a brief life composed of freefall, to the never-ending death march of duckhood.

Then my grandmother, who's dying, had an extended hospital stay for internal bleeding. I didn’t freeze the eggs. I forgot to, the way you forget about that homework assignment you need to get done tomorrow and spend all of today in bed, forgetting about it so hard you can think of nothing else.

So the eggs are pretty well-gestated now. They’ll hatch soon. It feels morally more complicated to terminate them when they’re so close. Besides, I don’t need DeSantis on my ass for third-trimester duck abortion, times being what they are.

And then, breakthrough – I did some research on Muscovy ducks. They’re actually one of the species that lay their eggs in high places all the time. The baby ducks survive huge drops as a matter of course, following their mother’s call safely out of trees and off of cliff’s edges. They will be completely fine if I don’t interfere.

My dilemma: they will be completely fine if I don’t interfere.

It’s easy to hate many of the Florida invasives for the havoc they wreak on this complex, unique ecosystem. I pull up snake plants; I give iguanas the stink-eye. It’s harder to hate others. Ethically, in a utilitarian sense, it is best practice to advocate for stray cats to be euthanized. They are the apocalypse of the North American bird. And yet they’re my friends. They’re soft and nice and they seem to understand me emotionally, in the common mammalian way. It’s not that any of them deserve to die – it’s a question of population reduction for the sake of the remaining environment. It is practical and necessary. TNR will never be enough. And yet they’re my friends.

Even the nonnatives that don’t actively damage native populations aren’t innocent – they eat the food of other species, take up resources and space, carry disease. Muscovy ducks are not the worst of the Florida invasives, but, as a whole, Florida is being eaten by their kind. I care deeply about this. As a matter of policy I believe that such species should be humanely, but swiftly, dealt with.

I am not a believer in trolley problems. Whether I lower the ducks in a bucket or simply allow them to fly away, my action or inaction has the same effect on the ecosystem I’ve studied and loved.

I went up to the duck the other day and looked into her blank black eyes over the rim of the lemon pot. I said to her, “Are your babies in there?” She said nothing. I checked, and the eggs were not yet hatched. “I should really do something about this,” I told her. “You’re invasive.” And I heard instantly in my mind, in my own voice, the natural retort: “So are you.”

Great, she brought race into it. Well, how could she not? Introduced species are in America because of colonization. Every problem here is every other problem. Environmentalism is the great political octopus with its tendrils in every other issue under the sun. You cannot be an environmentalist without being anticapitalist. You cannot be an environmentalist without being antiracist. (And I’m a true Scotsman, of course – I have the photos of my great-great-great grandparents getting off the ship and first setting foot on American soil).

Yeesh, okay, let’s bring it back.

Alright, so then I came up with this fantasy where I let the duck eggs hatch and I keep the ducks on my porch as a kind of makeshift duck farm. Muscovies are eminently farmable – they have more meat than other species and apparently they lay the most delicious eggs. Or maybe I take them to a farm somewhere else where they live nice happy lives that end fruitfully on someone else’s table.

As I look around, writing this, I cannot see a single native Florida species. The trees along the canal, the grasses, the weeds, the Egyptian geese. If the sun was hitting right, I’d see snakeheads twisting in the hydrilla-choked shadows of the canal. For now, all I see is the great clods of algae at its surface.

There’s a feel-good answer to my duck problem. Some invasives are absorbed by the ecosystem. Yes, some argue (as you may have seen on the environmental side of Substack, links now lost in the annals of my browser history) that invasives aren’t a problem, simply a feature of nature’s adaptation to the anthropocene. I’ve seen manatees eating invasive water cabbage. Things aren’t really so bad with the cats, right? Given time, life finds a balance. The Florida sun shines.

But there is no time. Don’t you see? If this were a question of gradual change, it wouldn’t be a question at all. Species could adapt to slow warming, to slow migration. They have since the beginning of life on Earth. Buddy, I study ecology in South Florida. Don’t talk to me about biodiversity loss. Acting as if introduced species don’t have horrific biodiversity-reducing effects on threatened ecosystems like mine is dangerously naive. Natural Florida is dying now. It’s a unique, crucial, and beautifully complex ecosystem and it’s dying because of development, pollution, and invasive species. It’s dying because of these eleven fucking baby ducks preparing to freefall like avenging angels off the side of my porch.

At the core: What do we owe our fellow species? From both sides: What do we owe?

That’s where I stopped writing, months ago. I couldn’t finish the story because I didn’t know how it would end. I didn’t know what I’d do. Ultimately, the summer was hot, hot, and the eggs cooked in the sun and never hatched, and my porch smelled awful, like sulfur and rotted lemon. I took the dead eggs out of the nest while the mother was away and threw them out. When she came back, she looked exactly the same as always, with her big black thoughtless eyes. She kept coming back to my porch. And she shat all over it. Puddles and puddles of green, goopy duck shit all up and down the length of the porch. She hadn’t ever done this before. My mother swore it was revenge. We felt bad about it, but we started chasing her off with a broom. After a while, she stopped coming back.

And that’s the answer, isn’t it? The summer got too hot. The hurricanes came and the canal filled with algae. The ethical dilemma baked in its shell.