Ducks

It’s been a while since the last post about animals, so I thought maybe it was time to talk about ducks.  

SOME DUCKS

Mallard                                                  Eider duck

Teal                                                       King eider duck

Crested merganser duck                        Curious ducks   

 
Crested pekin duck                             Duck à l'orange
 

ROAST DUCK

One of my embryonic vegetarian experiences involved duck. Whenever we had dinner at my grandmother’s house, she would make roast chicken. She would set it in the middle of the table, and my grandfather would carve it up, and he would always ask everyone what part they wanted, even though he knew perfectly well what parts each person always wanted.

And then one day my grandmother roasted a duck. The setting-on-the-table, carving and serving ritual was the same as ever  and the duck even looked like a large chicken. But it was all wrong. This was a duck. Chicken was food – when you ate “chicken,” you weren’t actually eating a chicken; you were just eating food. But duck was different. Ducks were the birds that swam in ponds and said “quack”. They weren’t food.

And suddenly the carcass on the table even looked different. It no longer looked like an oversized roast chicken – it looked like an animal that had had its head and feet chopped off and its feathers pulled out. I ate it, but it was definitely a turning point in my dietary career. 

FEEDING THE DUCKS AT THE PARK

Do you remember those trips to the park when you were little, when you threw bread crusts at the ducks? Well, it turns out that you shouldn't have done that. You should have given them:

• Berries, fruit and nuts
• Grass and weeds
• Seeds and grain
• Algae
• Insects
• Snails and worms
• Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians

 

But don't worry too much about it. If you didn't kill them with your bread, chances are they would be dead by now anyway. They might have been eaten by a fox, got stuck in frozen water over the winter, or been killed by somebody else's bread crusts. 

Ducks are reminded that they are forbidden to eat bread.

IMPRINTING

When a duckling hatches, it imprints on the first large moving object that it sees (provided that it sees something suitable within the first 24-48 hours after hatching), and follows it around like a shadow after that. In most cases, it imprints on its mother, but if the mother isn't around, then the imprinting  phenomenon can go delightfully off the rails, as below: 

A STORY ABOUT A DUCK

A duck walked into a bar.

“Good day,” it said to the barman. “I would like some duck food, please.”

“Duck food?” replied the barman. “You’re in the wrong place, I’m afraid. This is a bar.”

“Oh!” said the duck. “I do beg your pardon. Goodbye.”

And off it waddled.

The next day, it was back.

“Good day,” it said. “May I have some duck food?”

“I told you yesterday,” replied the barman, “we don’t have duck food.”

So the duck toddled off again.

This scene was repeated every day for a week, until one day: 

“Good afternoon, barman. A portion of your finest duck food, please.”

“That’s enough!” exploded the barman. “If you come back here one more time asking for duck food, I’ll nail your feet to the floor!”

The duck raised its eyebrows in alarm and waddled off, looking perturbed.

The next day, in it came again.

“Um, hello,” it said. “Could I have some nails, please?”

“What does this look like – a hardware store?” scoffed the barman. “We don’t have any nails here.”

“In that case,” replied the duck, “I’d like some duck food, please.”

THE DUCKING MAN

Two men walk into a bar. The third man, following them, ducks. Why does he duck?

Answer: So that he doesn’t walk into the bar.

A BRIEF FORAY INTO THE FOREST

How do elephants hide in the forest?

They paint their toenails red and hide in cherry trees.

How do they get up the trees?

They sit on a sapling and wait for it to grow.

How do they get down again?

They sit on a leave and wait for autumn.

Why do crocodiles have flat backs? 

Because they go around in forests in the autumn.

Why do ducks have webbed feet?

To stamp out forest fires.

Why do elephants have big feet?

To stamp out flaming ducks.

A BRIEF FORAY INTO DAISY-DOTTED MEADOWS
Two cows were standing in a meadow, eating daisies. 
"You know," said one of the cows, "I'm terribly concerned about catching foot-and-mouth disease."
"Heh," snorted the other cow. "I don't have to worry. I'm a duck."

THE DUCK
by Ogden Nash

Frequently used as a reference by taxonomists.

Behold the duck
It does not cluck. 

A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond.
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups.

THE MANLET: A POEM BY LEWIS CARROLL

Lewis Carroll didn’t just write Alice in Wonderland. He also wrote a remarkable collection of essays, short stories and poetry. This is one of his masterpieces:

In stature the Manlet was dwarfish--

No burly, big Blunderbore he;

And he wearily gazed on the crawfish

His Wifelet had dressed for his tea.

"Now reach me, sweet Atom, my gunlet,

And hurl the old shoelet for luck;

Let me hie to the bank of the runlet,

And shoot thee a Duck!"

She has reached him his minikin gunlet;

She has hurled the old shoelet for luck;

She is busily baking a bunlet,

To welcome him home with his Duck.

On he speeds, never wasting a wordlet,

Though thoughtlets cling, closely as wax,

To the spot where the beautiful birdlet

So quietly quacks.

Where the Lobsterlet lurks, and the Crablet

So slowly and sleepily crawls;

Where the Dolphin's at home, and the Dablet

Pays long, ceremonious calls;

Where the Grublet is sought by the Froglet;

Where the Frog is pursued by the Duck;

Where the Ducklet is chased by the Doglet--

So runs the world's luck!

He has loaded with bullet and powder;

His footfall is noiseless as air;

But the Voices grow louder and louder,

And bellow and bluster and blare.

They bristle before him and after,

They flutter above and below,

Shrill shriekings of lubberly laughter,

Weird wailings of woe!

They echo without him, within him;

They thrill through his whiskers and beard;

Like a teetotum seeming to spin him,

With sneers never hitherto sneered.

"Avengement," they cry, "on our Foelet!

Let the Manikin weep for our wrongs!

Let us drench him, from toplet to toelet,

With Nursery Songs!

"He shall muse upon 'Hey! Diddle! Diddle!'

On the Cow that surmounted the Moon;

He shall rave of the Cat and the Fiddle,

And the Dish that eloped with the Spoon;

And his soul shall be sad for the Spider,

When Miss Muffet was sipping her whey,

That so tenderly sat down beside her,

And scared her away!

"The music of Midsummer madness

Shall sting him with many a bite,

Till, in rapture of rollicking sadness,

He shall groan with a gloomy delight;

He shall swathe him, like mists of the morning,

In platitudes luscious and limp,

Such as deck, with a deathless adorning,

The Song of the Shrimp!

"When the Ducklet's dark doom is decided,

We will trundle him home in a trice;

And the banquet, so plainly provided,

Shall round into rose-buds and rice;

In a blaze of pragmatic invention

He shall wrestle with Fate, and shall reign;

But he has not a friend fit to mention,

So hit him again!"

He has shot it, the delicate darling!

And the Voices have ceased from their strife;

Not a whisper of sneering or snarling,

As he carries it home to his wife;

Then, cheerily champing the bunlet

His spouse was so skilful to bake,

He hies him once more to the runlet

To fetch her the Drake!

DUCK LANGUAGES

One of my first French lessons at school was “À la ferme,” where we learned the names of various animals, where they were standing, and what noise they made.

“Le chat est sur le mur. Le chat fait ‘miao!’ ”

“La vache est derrière l’arbre. La vache fait ‘meuh! ”

“Le canard est dans l’eau. Le canard fait ‘coin coin!”

And there you have it. French ducks don’t say “quack” – they say “coin”. So you won’t be surprised to hear that ducks speak other languages too. My favourite is Swedish .

Afrikaans	: kwak-kwak.
Albanian	: mak mak.
Arabic (Algeria)	: couak couak.
Bengali	: gack-gack.
Catalan	: cuac, cuac.
Chinese (Mandarin)	: gua gua.
Croatian	: kva-kva.
Danish	: rap.
Dutch	: kwak kwak.
English	: quack quack.
Esperanto	: gik-gak.
Estonian	: prääks prääks.
Finnish	: kvaak kvaak.
French	: coin coin.
German	: quack, quack.
Hebrew	: ga ga ga.
Hungarian	: háp-háp.
Italian	: qua qua.
Japanese	: gaagaa.
Korean	: kkoyk-kkoyk.
Norwegian	: kvakk-kvakk.
Polish	: kwa kwa.
Portuguese (Portugal)	: qua qua qua.
Portuguese (Brazil)	: quá quá.
Russian	: krya-krya.
Slovene	: ga-ga.
Spanish (Spain)	: cuá cuá.
Spanish (Argentina)	: cuac cuac.
Swedish	: kvack.
Thai	: gaab gaab (with falling tone).
Turkish	: vak, vak.
Ukrainian	: krya-krya.
Vietnamese	: quak-quak.

SOME GRATUITOUS CUTE DUCKLINGS

 

On learning the viola

I have recently taken up the viola, after years of mulling over the idea. I have followed the well-trodden path of crossing over from the violin, which I played many years ago but never developed a real bond with. I am fairly sure that a large part of the reason why I didn’t develop this bond was that it wasn’t the right instrument for me: it was simply too high-pitched and screechy to be satisfying. The lower pitch and delicious throaty purr of the viola, I have discovered, are so much easier on the ear, and practising has become a pleasure.

Learning music in France comes with a particular challenge, though, and that is the Sol-Fa system. We English-speakers learn to call our notes A, B, C, D, E, F and G. But French-speakers (among others) call them Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La and Si. And it is of limited helpfulness to have watched The Sound of Music once when you were little, when you have a teacher bellowing in your ear, “No, no, play Si on the Sol string, not on the La string!” and you don’t have a clue what he’s talking about, so you just say, “OK,” and try to work it out for yourself.

Apart from note names, the biggest shock to the system is the alto clef. "What is the alto clef?" you may well ask. Quite. You would be forgiven for not knowing what it is. To fully grasp its obscurity, you first need to understand the overarching importance of the treble and bass clefs. Here’s a whistlestop tour:

This is the stave, which you write your music on:

This is Middle C:

Any note higher than Middle C is in the treble range. The treble clef is a system used for writing music at a high (or highish) pitch. Using this system, the middle line of the stave represents this note:

Any note lower than Middle C is in the bass range. The bass clef is used for writing at low or lowish pitches. Under this system, the middle line of the stave represents this note:

So music for high-pitched instruments is written using the treble clef system, and music for low-pitched instruments is written with the bass clef system.  (The piano, being both high- and low-pitched, uses both simultaneously and makes no drama about it.)

So far so good, but this doesn’t take into account instruments with a middle pitch. If you try to write for such an instrument using either the treble or the bass clef, you will frequently find yourself overflowing off the top or bottom of your stave (which is permissible but horrendously cumbersome and hard to read.) So then you might try flitting between clefs, selecting the most appropriate for that moment – but you’re likely to get a headache keeping track of them.

A number of instruments, such as the saxophone or French horn, get round the problem by transposing, meaning that whatever you write for them to play, they will play at a lower pitch. This is quite an ingenious contrivance, because it means the music is written at a higher pitch than it actually sounds, i.e. in the treble clef, with the notes all fitting comfortably on the stave and not falling off the bottom, but when it’s played, it still comes out right. The transposition business does create its own set of problems, certainly, but for the most part, it serves its purpose.

And then along came the viola. The viola is a middle-pitch instrument, but it won’t be transposed like the others. Nor will it have messy staves or unwieldy clef-work. So what is an instrument to do but use a different clef altogether? One in which the middle line represents not D nor B but Middle C.

The viola is the only instrument that uses it on a regular basis; in fact, the alto clef is sometimes called the “viola clef” for that reason. A very few other instruments, such as the English horn and the trombone, may venture into it from time to time when they are feeling fruity, but generally go scuttling back to the relative safety of the treble or bass clefs fairly quickly.

And now you understand the full significance of the alto clef and may have some sympathy for me, who, having had the treble and bass clefs instilled in me at the dawn of my music-playing life, have now had to go back to Square One and learn to read again.

I feel my teacher doesn’t always appreciate just how confusing an undertaking this is. He should, since he’s a violin immigrant himself, but he probably went through this stage so long ago now that he’s forgotten how it feels to have to recalibrate both your brain and your fingers. In my second lesson, he had me playing Pachelbel’s Canon (sad but true; and what’s even sadder and equally true is that in the metro station on my way home from the lesson, I passed a string ensemble playing it too. You’d think they would know better). He played it together with me (four bars behind, for the sake of authenticity), and at one point I hesitated over a note.

“Continuez!” he barked. “Jamais arrêter! Si vous vous arrêtez, tout le monde vous casse la gueule…”

(Approximately: “Don’t stop, or you’ll have everyone coming down on you like a tonne of bricks.”)

Ah. My first reminder that the viola is a social instrument.

The social aspect of the instrument is a big reason why I chose viola lessons over piano (although I still hope to start piano lessons again one day). I might not have been the most enthusiastic of violin students, but I loved playing in orchestras. It is a wonderful experience of divide-specialise-and-cooperate: each person makes their contribution, and it all adds together to make something magnificent (for a given value of “magnificent”). And my objective at the moment, the lighthouse that I’m steaming towards, is to learn to play the viola well enough to play in an orchestra.

In the meantime, even just playing a duet with my teacher gives me enormous pleasure, because it makes me feel I’m cooperating to produce something pleasing. When I play together with him, I don’t only want to play the notes correctly, I also want to play beautifully, because I feel responsible for making what he is playing sound beautiful.

I expect that playing the viola in an orchestra will be a very different experience from playing the violin. The violin is a bit like the mollycoddled youngest child of the orchestra – it gets all the fun parts, usually the melody, and is only rarely required to sit quietly while the grown-ups talk, on top of which it is usually positioned at the front of the stage where everyone can see it. So it generally ends up hogging the attention. The viola, meanwhile, is shunted into the middle to provide the musical wallpaper – the parts that give colour and texture but that nobody is likely to actually notice.

This unobtrusiveness is the source of countless viola jokes.

How do you make a violin sound like a viola?

Sit it in the back row and don’t play it.

Why can’t a violist play with a knife in his back?

Because then he can’t lean back in his chair.

Why don't violists play hide-and-seek?
Because no one will look for them.

A violist and a cellist were on a sinking ship. 
"Help!" shouted the cellist. "I can't swim!"
"Don't worry," said the violist. "Just fake it."

What do you do with a dead violist?

Move him back a row.

I don’t think I’ll mind this background role, though. Having done my stint as a spoilt youngest child, I’m happy to shift into the unobtrusive middle-child role, making my contribution to the overall magnificence without demanding any personal credit.

I leave you with a video of the viola sounding beautiful:  

Kathy Corecig playing her "Degustation: seven courses for solo viola"

The Punishment Myth

I recently read Psychology in Plain English by Dean Richards. One of the chapters, called The Punishment Myth, deals with the way we tend to approach punishment and how our approach is, for the most part, rather ineffectual. So in the interests of making the world a better place, I thought I should let you know how we can improve our use of punishment.

Punishment comes very naturally to us. If someone does something we don’t like, our automatic reaction is to want to punish them – by hitting them, by damaging something belonging to them, by taking away their privileges, by stopping speaking to them, or simply by giving them a dirty look.

The problem is that for the most part, punishment doesn’t actually work. Certainly, the concept  might have potential, but in many cases, we don’t simply use it effectively.

But before we go any further, what does “effectively” mean? What “effect” are we trying to achieve? By smacking the child who has just broken a glass or by glaring at the person talking loudly in a restaurant, are we:

(a) trying to provide a deterrent, by showing them “This is what happens if you do this action, so you’d better not do it again” or

(b) trying to even the scores?

And here’s the crux of the matter. Frequently, we might think that we’re providing a deterrent for future offences, but in reality, we’re actually just trying to even the score. We’re thinking backwards instead of forwards.

It makes a lot more sense, though, to take approach (a), using punishment as a deterrent. Then it will keep paying off in the future, rather than just attempting to balance out things that are already in the past.

Now that we’ve established that, we can look at how to use punishment effectively. In order for a punishment to be effective, it needs to fulfil the following criteria:

1)      It must be unavoidable

2)      It must be immediate

3)      It must be moderately severe

4)      It must be infrequent

5)      It must be logical

1)      IT MUST BE UNAVOIDABLE

A fundamental problem is that punishment doesn’t actually motivate you to avoid the punishable behaviour. It really doesn’t. Think about it. All it does is motivate you to avoid the punishment itself.

One way to avoid the punishment is to hide the action. If you are a teenager who smokes and you know that your parents will be angry if they find out, then you simply don’t smoke at home. You hide your cigarettes and you chew gum before you see your parents so they won’t smell the smoke on your breath.

Another way is to avoid the punisher. Suppose your father has found out that you smoke and is giving you dull lectures on the dangers of cigarettes. So you start avoiding your father. You leave the house early in the morning before he is up, you come home and go straight to your room, you avoid being in the same room with him. And you keep smoking.

In both cases, the punishment has been avoided, and it has had no effect.

2)      IT MUST BE IMMEDIATE

Look at that big fat juicy hamburger sitting in front of you. It’s glistening with oil and dripping with barbecue sauce and garnished with pickles, and the smell of the meat tickles your nostrils. It’s irresistible.

Unfortunately, your doctor has told you that your cholesterol level is sky high and you need to stop with the hamburgers. Hamburgers will send your cholesterol soaring and you will develop heart disease and die.

Yes, but look at the hamburger! It’s right there, begging to be eaten, and it will make you so happy! Yes, it’ll give you heart disease and kill you, but it won’t kill you today. It’ll kill you next year, or the year after, or in ten years’ time. But if you give in and eat it, then the pleasure will be now.

And “now” wins out every time.

But imagine that you knew that you would have a heart attack the minute you bit into the hamburger. Then you’d exercise some self-control. If the punishment is immediate, it suddenly becomes a whole lot more effective. It’s related to the point above, on unavoidability. For some reason, “delayed” appears to equate to “avoidable” in our minds.

3)      IT MUST BE MODERATELY SEVERE

As with so many things in life, you need to find a happy medium between too much and too little.

Imagine, for example, that you’re driving and jump a red light, forcing a car to slow down to avoid an accident. You know that you shouldn’t do it, and you feel a bit guilty, but you’re in a rush. 

The driver of the car that slowed down for you shoots you a dirty look. You shrug, drive on, and within a minute have forgotten the entire incident.

That driver’s dirty look was an insufficiently severe punishment. At the next intersection, you will jump another red light. Zero effect.

Now imagine that instead of just giving you a dirty look, the driver follows you, and the next time you stop at a red light, gets out, marches over to your car and bashes your windscreen in.

How do you feel? Are you full of remorse at having jumped the red light? Are you vowing never to break the rules of the road again? Of course you’re not. You’re too busy feeling furious with the guy smashing your windscreen. You’re just thinking how you’d like to bash his head in.

The driver’s reaction was overly severe punishment. The problem with this approach is that it completely distracts the receiver from the deed they have done to merit this treatment, and simply makes them angry at the punisher.

4)      IT MUST BE INFREQUENT

Punishment can't be used too frequently if it is to be effective, because if it is a regular occurrence, it “normalises” and just becomes part of the backdrop of your life.

Imagine you’re a child and your mother is always shouting at you. You soon learn not to take any notice. If your mother is cross, then it doesn’t merit particular attention, because she’s always cross.

But imagine if your mother is always gentle and smiling and indulgent. Then one day you do something and she stops smiling. She is cross. Your docile mother who is never cross! Something bad has clearly happened, and you want the bad thing to be put right and never to happen again, so that your mother can go back to being kind and smiling.

5)      IT MUST BE LOGICAL AND NATURAL

Now here’s the part we keep getting wrong. A logical and natural punishment is one which would be a normal result of the undesired behaviour.

The example Dean Richards gives in his book is of a child leaving his bicycle in the driveway, where the father nearly runs it over as he reverses the car out. So the father storms back into the house and confiscates the child’s X-box.

The problem with this is that losing access to the X-box is not a natural result of leaving a bicycle in the driveway. The two things are completely unrelated.

So what would be the natural result of leaving the bicycle there? Probably that it would be crushed by the reversing car, leaving the child without a bicycle.

Now, it would be counterproductive to actually run the bicycle over to teach the child a lesson, because the parent would be landed with the cost of repairing it (and possibly the car). But the effect of leaving the child without the bicycle can still be achieved, by locking it up. The father can calmly explain that he was worried that the bicycle would get damaged, so he has put it somewhere safe and will unlock it in a day or two.

Being deprived of your bicycle is a logical, natural consequence of leaving it lying in the driveway. Next time you’ll put it away.

Many parents might be tempted to use smacking as a catch-all punishment. The problem with this is that being smacked is not a logical or natural result of anything very much. Smacking, for the most part, is a rubbish punishment.

SO IF WE ARE NOT TO PUNISH, THEN WHAT ARE WE TO DO?

Obviously, we not only want people to stop behaving badly, we also want them to behave well. How do you make someone behave well?

1)      REWARD DESIRED BEHAVIOUR

But you already knew that. 

2)      MAKE SURE THE SUBJECT KNOWS WHAT THE DESIRED BEHAVIOUR IS

It’s no good telling someone not to do something if they don’t know what they should be doing instead.

This occurred to me the other day when I saw some children on a train chasing each other round and round a pole, giggling hysterically, making themselves dizzy and bumping into other people.

“Careful!” called their mother. “Gently, children! Hey! I said gently!”

“If I were a four-year-old child,” I thought, “would I know what my mother meant if she told me to be ‘careful’ and play ‘gently’? I would probably think, “But I am being careful, and I am playing gently!” If, however, she told me to ‘walk, not run’ or to ‘stay away from other people,’ or indeed to ‘sit down quietly,’ then I would understand exactly what she wanted of me.”

This is especially effective if by performing the desired behaviour prevents the subject from performing the undesired behaviour, as illustrated in Amy Sutherland’s very amusing and enlightening article “How I trained my husband”. She describes a trainer of cranes who was annoyed with the cranes landing on his head and shoulders, so he trained them to land on mats instead. He didn’t punish the undesirable behaviour – he simply had the cranes replace it with something more desirable.

3)      EXPLAIN YOUR REASONING

You are much more likely to follow rules if you can see the sense in them. For example, if you are seven years old and your mother tells you to pick your toys up from the bedroom floor and put them in the cupboard, you will probably think she is just trying to sabotage your attempts to go out to play. However, if she tells you, “Put your toys in the cupboard so you know where to find them next time. Do you remember yesterday you couldn’t find your Spiderman? That’s because you didn’t put him away when you finished playing with him. And if you put your toys away now, that won’t happen again” then you are more likely to realise that the rule your mother is imposing is for your own good.

Furthermore, next time you play with your toys, you are more likely to put them away of your own accord, because you can see the sense in the rule.

So explaining your reasoning makes people more amenable to following rules and encourages them to police themselves when you are not around to enforce the rule. And if you can’t think of a good reason why you want a certain behaviour to be followed, then it’s worth asking yourself if it really does need to be followed.

4)      ALLOW THE SUBJECT TO HAVE SOME SAY IN THE RULES

You are more likely to follow a rule if you have imposed it on yourself. I have used this to great effect in the classroom. On the first day of a course, the first thing I get my students to do is to draw up their own “Code of Conduct”. They generally come up with the sorts of rules that I would have imposed myself (arrive on time, switch off phones, listen to the person who is speaking, etc.) but because they have come up with the ideas themselves, they feel more attachment to them. Then as soon as there is any disorder, a simple reading out of the Code of Conduct is generally enough to restore order.

      5)    MAKE IT EASY TO COMPLY WITH THE RULES

If you want your children to go sleep instead of staying up watching TV, then don’t put a TV in their bedroom. If you want them to eat healthily, then have healthy food in the house. If you want your elderly mother to use a mobile phone, then make sure she has a simple one that she understands how to use.

CONCLUSION

You’d think that after millions of years of living together, we would have developed ways to influence each other’s behaviour that actually work. And when the ideas above are pointed out to us, they all seem very obvious, but clearly, they’re not, otherwise everybody would behave according to them. So it’s just as well that someone like Dean Richards is there to point out our errors to us. Step by step, we will make the world a better place.