A Baby Considers A Duck
Almost every morning I take my 11-month-old daughter on a walk to Lake Merritt, a brackish tidal lagoon feeding into the San Francisco Bay. We linger by the little freshwater pools at the wildlife sanctuary (“America’s First”) to look at the birds. There are countless Canadian geese, a single Toulouse Goose, one hulking Muscovy duck, dozens of mallards, and a few black-crowned night herons standing in predatory stillness at the edges of the pools. I point to the birds one by one, telling my daughter their names. “Duck. Goose. Heron.” She watches from her stroller. I don’t ever know what she’s thinking, or if she’s thinking. But sometimes—sometimes—she says the word duck.
Maybe. It sounds like duck. I think she says duck. But I can’t really tell.
As a new parent, I’m constantly watching out for notable firsts. First favorite toy. (Giraffe blanket.) First tooth. (On the bottom, a little tiny fang.) First solid food. (Sweet potato.) First time crawling, standing, sidling, toddling. Then the big one: first word. But first word is a little iffy. Often my daughter makes noises. Sometimes the noises seem to congeal into something more solid. Like, when we’re stationed by the pools at Lake Merritt, and I’m pointing to the birds, and says very clearly something that sounds like the word duck. I’ll look at her: “Baby, did you just say the word duck?” She’ll look back up at me, meet my eyes, and continue: Eleight eleight eleight. Bla lee a lee.
First words happen eventually, of course. Over three quarters of babies make something like their first word before the age of one. These tend to be baby-sized words: Da-da. Ma-ma. Hi. Bye. Uh-oh. Woof Woof. Mostly nouns, people, games, actions, and animal noises. Younger siblings often learn the word ‘no.’And for our daughter, one of these first words (maybe) is that strange word duck. In most Indo-European languages, the word duck comes from the same root: anas, (Latin), anatra (Italian), ente (German), eend (Dutch). The English word duck is different, perhaps a euphemism originating from the dabbing ducks’ practice of ducking face first under the water to feed—or as Ogden Nash says of the duck (“which does not cluck”): “When it dines or sups, / It bottoms ups.” According to the research project Wordbank, by 11 months, only about 5% of American English-speaking babies can say the word ‘duck.’ By 17 months, over half of American English-speaking babies are saying it.
If my daughter is one of those one-in-twenty 11 month olds who can produce the word ‘duck’, what is it that she’s trying to say? Is she just repeating the sounds I make? Or is she saying a word, trying to link sounds to something out there in the world to tell me—look da-da, I see duck, too. This gets complicated by the fact that there are a surprising number of things that the word duck can pick out. There are the mallards that paddle in the pools at Lake Merritt: the males with their surprisingly iridescent green heads, and the dowdy females with their mottled autumn-leaf plumage, both with those daring slits of blue feathers they keep hidden under their wings, called wing speculum. But the male and female adult ducks aren’t all that the word duck can describe. Sometimes (if those night herons haven’t eaten them) there are the baby ducks, which are strange, scrabbly, scruffy things. All different. All duck. Can my daughter understand that they are all ducks?
Then there are other things that we call duck, which have only a passing resemblance to the birds we see by the pools by Lake Merritt. She has a whole series of duck toys, mostly little yellow rubber ducks we play with in the bath. Then there are her board books where ducks are a kind of celebrity. One of my daughter’s favorite books—Bright Baby’s First 100 Words—includes duck five times in its pages: twice as a bath-time rubber duck, and then three times as fuzzy yellow ducklings; never as a full-sized duck, either domestic, or wild. There are the charming cartoon ducks in the works of Sandra Boynton, oblong figure 8s with a yellow beak and a jaunty tuft of tail feathers sticking out their backside. My daughter looks at these fictional ducks. She says something like the word duck—does she know that we lump them together with the mallards at the pools at Lake Merritt?
What makes these play ducks look so different from the mallards in the pools at Lake Merritt? Wild mallards, which are the ancestors of all domestic ducks besides the Muscovy duck, have a wealth of genes for color. They can be black, blue, silver, chocolate, lavender, or lilac, or white. Selective breeding can sift the colors still further. The ducks shipped from Shanghai to New Jersey (six hens and three drakes), that would become the ancestors of the most successful domestic meat duck breed, the Pekin, were snow white with yellow bills—Donald Duck, rather than the black Mallard which inspired Daffy. And so now most domestic ducks are white, like Jemima Puddleduck, an Aylesbury who would’ve been raised for her meat.
The duck’s centrality in the world of children’s media is curious because the duck is so marginal to our everyday worlds. It is not like its other farmyard animal companions, cow, pig and dog, who are common on our houses, either by our sides or on our plates. It has always been a wetland food, something only incompletely tamed, something special and marginal. The lists of food sold in London meat markets did not include duck until the 14th Century, when it was called “tame mallard.” French people eat ducks, but not frequently English-speaking people. (French babies, oddly do not pick up the word canard as quickly as English-speaking babies—only half by 19 months can say the word, probably because the multi-syllable canard is quite a bit harder to say than the fun single syllable of duck.)
But why then is the duck one of the stars of the baby world? Is there a natural goofiness to the duck that makes it the perfect butt of jokes? Is it the duck’s ridiculous pride? Is it the word itself—duck—that slightly daffy, abrupt sound? Or is it the fact that ducks are half-in and half-out of the human world? At once, they are white-plumed, domestic animals, plump and proud, with a touch of the naivety of the nursery about them—that Jemima Puddleduck doomed earnestness, happily traipsing off into the jaws of a hungry wolf. And then there is also something of the irate mallard about them as well, the Daffy Duck arrogance, the fearsomeness of their corkscrew penises and squeaking defensiveness, their demanding quacking insistence that they are here and they demand your respect, their urge to migrate, to leave home, to explore. Our babies, like the ducks, span both worlds, the farm and the wild, the cooked and the raw, the sweet and the fearsome. Infancy is the most animalistic of the stages of human life. We shit anywhere, know no modesty, are all coiled up balls of desire and aversion, we scream, we bite, milk dribbles off our chins, we grab at everything, and (for a time) put it all in our mouths to gnaw. And yet babies are also the sweet center of the domestic world, gentle, soft, and entrancing, calm and innocent. Babies are pulled close, nurtured, tended to, encased in love, protected from sharp edges, danger, cold, the outside. Ducks and babies alike span the boundary between wild and tame.
I’m left wondering each time we set out in the stroller for Lake Merritt, what does my daughter know? What does she understand of the words I babble to her; what does she mean by the words she babbles to me? When we talk to each other, I feel both connected to her—I say duck, she says duck back—but also profoundly wary, as if there is a yawning gap between my world and hers that we will only ever imperfectly and never permanently close. I wait for her words to come, so that she can bridge that gap for me. And it makes me want to pull her very close to me and never let her go.