OK, so Daffy had to be duckin’ Elmer’s duckshot
every damned duck season
Donald works for a corporate juggernaut out to
buy up every independent franchise until it
monopolizes the film industry
and, Howard, well how much less fortunate can you get
than to be “trapped in a world that you never made”
but at least he had his own Marvel Comic
and was immortalized in a Pretenders song
of course, just about anyone with the surname Duck
can vouch for what a drag it is to be the subject
of playground poetry with such handy rhymes
as suck, yuk, fuck and schmuck
but I can guarantee you’ve never heard a tale
of greater anatine woe than the real life story of:
The Labrador Duck
a handsome black and white species
(though, as with most waterfowl, the far sexier ♀
had much more modest plumage than the ♂)
that once thrived foraging for mollusks in the shallow
coastal waters of the western North Atlantic,
it has the dubious distinction of being the first
animal endemic to the western hemisphere
whose extinction can be directly traced
to invasive European hominids
as is generally the case with these not-so-bright
animals (the invasive ones), they apparently
finally noticed by the mid-1800s that they weren’t
seeing these ducks but on rare occasions anymore
damned if they could figure out what to do
about that, though, and one not-so-fine day
in December 1878 on Long Island NY, some
green young duck-hungry Fuddite went out
a-huntin’ an’ came home with a whole passel
o’ ducks, including an odd-looking black and
white one that no one recognized
word got around town but, by the time a local
naturalist got out to the house to check it out,
all that was left was the head and neck –
enough for ornithologists to later confirm that
this was indeed the last known Labrador Duck
in all fairness, it was probably never very common
and, being a sea duck that was rarely seen inland,
wasn’t very well known
apparently, the flesh wasn’t very tasty and it had
a distinctive clammy odor to it, so the species
probably wasn’t a favorite of hunters
what most likely did it in was the disappearance
of its favored molluscan prey due to a rapidly-
changing coastal habitat resulting from the
burgeoning human population
still, it’s a too-often-retold story:
here comes Homo sapiens...
there goes the neighborhood!
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