Feeding The Spirit Animals

Unrelated story: I was in a gray mood this morning, so I thought that listening to Christmas music might help. It didn't, and I also learned that in the song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" at the part at the end where they're all singing the chorus, everybody is singing "Feed the wooooorld!" when all this time -- 20+ YEARS! -- I thought they were just singing "We know, oooooooooh!" I feel like an irredeemable idiot (assuming that I am not already, in fact, an irredeemable idiot).

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While we were out enjoying the warmish weather yesterday and discovering that Shae's spirit animal is the wood duck, we did in fact take some time out to feed the ducks.

There were SWARMS of them, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, we fed many different species actual ducks without any interference from Canada geese. Those things are NASTY.

In case you were wondering, the Chef's Selection for the day was stale heel ends of whole-wheat bread and crushed up stale ice cream cones. They really seemed to like it. Not sure if these ducks are particularly hungry or what -- they seemed like they were all a good size to me.

Notice the large bite mark out of the corner of this piece of bread. That is there because someone wanted to make sure that "everything is OK" before we fed it to the ducks. We've gone out in the past with stale cereal and didn't get a lot of takers.

This duck whistle from Wawa amuses me. The ducks seemed unfazed, but Shae really believes that she was communicating with them. A regular Dr. Doolittle, that one.

As you can see, feeding the ducks in exhausting. And highly meditative.