Fowl Friends
Recollections by Diana Boggs
Lucy Brown is one of three fowl friends (high school) I have had in my lifetime. The other two were Mel & Maud Mallard, a pair of Mallard ducks who lived on Bullock Pen Lake in Kentucky from 1995 to 2001. Each year they raised up their brood at our lakeside house. Mel & Maud became quite friendly & would walk up to the front door & quack to be fed. They were wary of the dogs but confident in their ability to avoid capture. If Mel saw me driving down our road that was lakeside, he would fly with me to land in our cove to get fed. He even talked about me to his duck friends. One day a huge flotilla of ducks swam into our cove. Mel was leading them. As they entered our cove, he stopped, turned & said "There she is, the most beautiful person in the world." So I know ducks talk about people.
I digress into my fowl friend past a bit more......
When I was in high school, lo these many years ago, I had a Science Project. It was Quail. What I hoped to achieve, I haven't a clue, now or then. At that time I didn't "get" Science. I thought it was not interesting. I was more interested in geography but there wasn't much of anything a geography major could do back then.
Since we had bird dogs, each spring the first Trixie (DC Behi's Csinos Csiny CD HOF) would bring us live baby rabbits and of course we always named them Fuzzy and of course we always tried to keep them and failed. They either disappeared or died, to our great regret.
At one point we tried quail. The folks used to hatch quail and quail are so darling when they first hatch. They follow anything that moves. We tried to start a couple of personalized quail, ourselves and things didn't go so well. My Science Teacher at that time had a handicapped daughter who had no friends. We gave her a tiny baby quail, named Lucy Brown.
Lucy became house trained and was a total delight to the girl. My Science teacher would hold class with Lucy sitting on her shoulder on occasion. There came a time when we got Lucy back and I can't remember the reason. Me and my sister kept Lucy Brown in her own cage. We would let Lucy out and Lucy LOVED to sashay by the dogs, which at that time the dogs were broke to wing and shot and knew they shouldn’t grab the quail walking around and around and around them.
Us kids played bird dog too, you know. I also think that Lucy understood when a dog was put on a "whoa" she was perfectly safe. Trixie also understood that Lucy was our pet. But… the bird better never cross beaks with her.
It didn't matter if it was a fun field trial in the bedroom or jumping from bed to bed. Lucy was a BLAST. She was so much fun we decided we wanted children so we rounded us up Charlie Brown from the quail pen. Charlie didn't take kindly to settling down and never did a pet.
We were friends with Dr Paul/Shirley Rothan's kids and of course their boys wanted Lucy too. So Lucy moved to Cincinnati. One day Lucy flew out the window. They expected her to come back. They saw glimpses of her but never was she seen again.
Lucy Brown was a good quail bird.
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