Our dear friends Misters Merriam and Webster define precocious as “exhibiting mature qualities at an unusually early age”. It comes from the Latin prefix prae-, meaning before or in front of, and coquo, meaning to cook or ripen. In animals, you are either a precocial or altricial species; altricial animals, like humans, produce helpless young with little hair or covering, an inability to feed or move well, and a particularly squishy body that make them rather in need of significant care by a parent. Precocial young, by contrast, are rapidly mobile, have larger brains, and require far less care off the bat.
Knowing this information is one thing, of course, but seeing it in action is another thing altogether. I, for one, feel like I understood the meaning of the word “precocious” best after I worked closely with birds. For a time, I worked in the Gulf of Maine monitoring island seabird nesting populations. Watching an Arctic tern chick go from cracking it’s way into the world to walking around, all fluffy and peeping for dinner, within a few minutes was a bit mindblowing (and made human babies seem way lamer in comparison, though I admit altriciality has its benefits, too). Birds, as a group, span the gap from precociality to altriciality far more than many other animal groups; passerines (songbirds), hawks/owls, and herons are all examples of the former, while chickens, ducks, and geese are the latter.
I bring all this up because I’ve been watching the ice move out of the cove behind the SLA’s headquarters. With the increase in open water has come an increase of feathery visitors to our backyard, largely waterfowl. Soon enough, wood ducks will move in. These perching ducks are incredibly recognizable in their finery – that bright, iridescent plumage is difficult to miss. Theirs is an interesting conservation story, one the SLA helps with in very small ways. We maintain a number of nesting boxes around our trail networks, boxes which we LRCC members check on and monitor every year. We did some work just a few days ago on some we have stationed around a beaver pond, clearing out old nesting material and egg fragments in favor of a fresh bed of wood shavings. Installations like those have, over the past century and along with hunting restrictions, helped bring this species back from low populations.
Wood ducks, like most ducks, have precocial young. A day after breaking out of their eggshells, their little chicks are crawling their way up the inside of the nesting box (using claws that are another trademark of the perching ducks, though wood ducks have notable ones) and launching themselves out into the world. Literally! Chicks have been recorded flinging themselves into the air from fifty feet up, without any help from their parents. They land in the water just fine, but seeing it, even in video, almost makes my heart stutter a little. For them, it's completely normal, but for me, it’s a death-defying stunt. At one day old! Imagining a baby Evil Knievel in a motorbike-crib combo launching himself over buses is just comically ridiculous, but that’s what wood ducks do. Sort of. It’s an imperfect comparison.
Conservation is, in many ways, a study in imperfection. We do the best with what we have to save what we have left. It can be difficult to relate to life forms that experience the world so differently from us, exemplified in one by precociality and altriciality, but that’s kind of the point. I think many people, myself included, are drawn to science and conservation in order to reduce a portion of the vast unknown. An insurmountable task, to be sure, but I might have said the same about a newborn little duckling surviving a fifty foot fall, once.
I’ll leave you with this, a poem titled “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry. Talking about wood ducks always makes me think of it, and of finding peace in both the unknowable far reaches of the universe and the everyday activities of a backyard pond.
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
Bri is the coordinator of Out of Touch Thursdays in the SLA’s conservation cottage (which involves, as you may have guessed, listening to Hall & Oates’ popular song “Out of Touch” on Thursdays). Learn more about Bri here!