My Time with the Flock: Finding My Sense of Place During the Pandemic
By Sara Klimek
May 7, 2021
It’s a rainy Tuesday morning in Huntington, Vermont. The skies keep the score of the morning rainfall, complete with lingering clouds that blanket the nearby mountains. An impatient blue jay cries in the distance, but he is no match for the cantankerous roar of quacks, chirps, and honks coming from the adjacent barn. It’s feeding time.
I’ve always been amazed at how animals maintain such a precise biological clock. As humans, we often forget that time is a societal construct; no natural law dictates how many seconds there are in a minute or how many minutes there are in an hour. You would think that because animals cannot—to our knowledge—calculate time, they would be somewhat removed from the pressures of its particularity. No “do this at this time, no later.” No “we can’t spend too much time on this because we have other things to do.”
This summer, time stood a little differently for humans. The COVID-19 outbreak, as apocalyptic as it still seems, has fundamentally changed our relationship to time. As millions around the globe are sequestered in their homes, people are relieved from the compulsory pressures of dropping the kids off at eight, arriving at work at nine, working until four, cooking dinner at six, and going to bed at eleven. For many, we are lingering in our homes and our thoughts now more than ever. Will we be able to resume life’s normal activities? Do we even want to?
I would say my flock of ducks thinks a little differently. It’s eight in the morning and regardless of the global panic ensuing in the world beyond, they are very, very insistent on being fed.
The story of how I found myself feeding over one hundred rescued Khaki Campbell ducks is an odd one, to say the least. The turbulence of the pandemic left me both laid off from the local pizza restaurant and torn from my student life at the University of Vermont. Without a means of paying upcoming summer rent, I began looking around for potential avenues for living that were both financially feasible and safe. A Facebook search led me to SHO Farm and an open position for a summer duck caretaking internship.
The farm (I should note here that farm is an understatement) is home to 1,300 acres of preserved Vermont forest, white-tailed deer, bears, porcupines, grouse, five staff members, and over one hundred rescued ducks. But you would never expect that from the immaculate stone wall and unsuspecting “private drive” sign on the road. At its heart, SHO is a sanctuary for both its human and non-human residents. What initially drew me to the farm was its emphasis on working synergistically with the land and its inhabitants rather than against it. Even the rats who nest in the eves of the barn are relocated carefully to other parts of the property where they can forage, deposit seeds, and propel the next generation of flora. Soiled hay from the barn is deliberately plopped into the permaculture orchard where it acts as a green manure for nut pines and seaberry bushes. Freshly picked bedstraw, comfrey, and amaranth are fed to the ducks to boost their phytonutrient intake. Everything has its time and its place.
Before coming to SHO, my experience with animals was primarily exploitative. This is not something I take lightly, but rather matter-of-factly. I rode horses competitively since age three. I ate meat until going vegan four years ago. I never stopped to think about where the leather on my saddle or my purse came from. I was kept blind by an exploitative animal agriculture paradigm that predicates itself on people’s willful ignorance. In the business of animal agriculture, corporations don’t willingly show images of our slaughtered kin hanging in shackles from the ceiling or sessile beings writhing in pain on the cold concrete of the “kill floor.” We’ve managed our own collective discomfort by forgetting that “humane slaughter” is an oxymoron and that animals die every day for the food that appears on our plates. In other words, we have divorced ourselves from the idea that Big Macs come from living beings because it’s easier than contending with the reality that our consumption choices kill.
SHO’s inhabitants are no different than the copious amounts of animals in the slaughter pipeline. The ducks rescued by founder Shawn Smith and Melissa Hoffman in 2016 were “byproducts” of the system: bound for slaughter when they stopped producing eggs. The male drakes would have been faced with an even shorter lifetime, as they provide less “benefit” to humans than their egg-laying counterparts. Shawn and Melissa were faced with a decision: to provide the ducks with a safe place to live out their days or remain complacent with the system. For two outspoken animal-welfare advocates, it was a no-brainer.
Shawn and Melissa found a team of three duck caretakers to join them on what would prove to be a blissful, yet turbulent journey. Alex (they/them), who joined the team in 2018, was the senior-most caretaker and served as a mentor for me throughout my months at SHO. They had many of the same questions I had about what it means to truly be an ethical vegan. Does ethical veganism extend itself to also protect the vulnerable workers who pick avocados and berries? Is it possible to create systemic change by opting to become an ethical vegan, or is larger-scale action needed? How can we shift the public mindset around the oxymoron of “humane slaughter?” These conversations solidified my justification for humid summer afternoons spent chiseling concrete blocks free of duck feces.
As a duck caretaker, I was the wearer of many hats and gloves. A good duck caretaker is able to maintain a careful eye for potential predators, coo startled ducks, and resolve disputes between pen-mates, all while cleaning, organizing, and maintaining a pristine living space for them. In many ways, SHO is both a matter of presence and a place where time stands still. Forget to close a gate? Shut off a water valve? The ducks remember, and you put them in jeopardy every time you decide to nod off rather than remaining attentive to the task at hand. It’s your job, but it’s their life. And in the wake of COVID-19, we have learned how precarious life can be.
Although my friends and my family laugh when I tell them how I spent the “Corona Summer” playing with rescued ducks in rural Vermont, I can’t help but admit how exhausting the job of duck caretaking really is. So why would anyone choose to spend their summer hucking hay bales into a stairwell, precisely angling door covers to prevent any heads from peeking out of pens, and refilling outdoor water bowls when the ducks clog them up with heaves of mud?
It’s for the moments I walk into the barn and see Sawyer and Finn, two of the drakes, taking a nap side-by-side in their pen, their tiny heads coddled into their feathers. It’s for the laughs the caretakers and I share when we watch the ducks play in their water bowls, splashing and diving around like kids in a pool for the first time. It’s for the after-work walks into the Vermont wilderness where deer forage five feet away from me, their long legs and delicate heads pulling at tufts of grass. It’s for the time I don’t have to spend worrying about the paper I have to write or the job I need to get after graduation. It’s for the time I can spend being, rather than waiting for what’s coming next. And in a world where everything moves so quickly, it’s become a rarity for me to sit back and envelope myself in what I have— quacks included.
