While walking Midi we found a baby duckling, apparently left behind because he couldn’t jump up over a curb and was walking along the street. After seeing a crow nearby eyeing his potential lunch, and being unable to find the mom, I took him home. We noticed that he seemed to have some trouble walking like there was something wrong with his foot. After thinking about it we decided to let him go at a local lake, thinking that maybe a female duck would adapt him. So I did that and watched him paddle around, coming up to various female ducks who all chased him away. So he headed toward shore and about that time I saw a Blue Heron (a giant bird about 5′ tall) taking an interest in him. I wasn’t too concerned since they only eat fish…
Wrong – “whack”, and the poor little duckling became lunch just like that. Right at that moment I wanted to do bad things to that Heron and was mad at myself for assuming he’d leave it along. But then I realized that it’s just nature disposing of weak, sick, and slow animals while at the same time feeding other animals. Still, it was hard to watch, seeing a harmless little guy I’d just been holding be killed in an instant. It’s hard to cheat nature; if an animal is sick or weak we sometimes get the idea that we can fix things, yet nature often sets things back the way it intended when given the chance.
To more happy news about the car… it’s about done – really! Of course even as I type this I realize that I forgot to add mounts at the rear for wheel-alignment strings. With Kimini, it was a pain to set up parallel strings when setting front and rear toe; this time there’ll be hard-points for a quick consistent setup. The plan is to really look the car over to make sure nothing’s missing before starting the big teardown for paint!