Our son-in-law began a new job in the Air Force yesterday. It is a position that he has been wanting and although it does not involve a change in rank at present, it seems like a promotion to him. One of the things about the new job is that for the next few months his work hours will be a normal daytime shift. After months of 12-hour shifts and frequent changes from night to day and back to night, he is looking forward to going to work at 7 am and returning home a little after 4 pm. The family celebrated with a nice dinner at home. As our meal was winding down, our grandson yelled “duck!” and headed for the door to the back patio. We weren’t too surprised because the neighbors have ducks and it seemed very possible that a duck could have flown over the six foot fence separating the two yards.

Sure enough, there was a duck in the yard. Within minutes there was a duck in the yard with an excited 4-year-old chasing it. It didn’t look like he had much of a chance of catching it. It was going back and forth along the fence that separates the two yards, walking, running, and occasionally flapping its wings. The flapping wings startled the boy enough that he didn’t ever attempt to catch the bird.

After watching for a few minutes, I decided to go get my shoes. Chasing a duck in the back yard in my stocking feet didn’t appeal to me. When I returned our daughter had opened the gate between the back yard and front yard, but the duck was having no part of it and wouldn’t go near the gate. She had joined her son in the chase. I suggested that they calm down, stop running and gently walk behind the duck towards me and I would pick it up and give it a boost over the fence. By then I could see that the bird had one wing clipped. Clipping a single wing is a common practice. Clipping the feathers doesn’t hurt the bird. They are made of a material similar to finger nails. Clipping only one wing throws the bird off balance when it attempts to fly and usually keeps it from leaving the designated area. However the neighbors have a very full back yard with chickens and a coop, pigs with a covered area, a trampoline, a back yard pool, which seems to have been given over to the ducks. The water in the pool is not clear and not inviting for human swimming. There is also a trailer, an assortment of furniture, and accumulations of other items in the yard. There are numerous things from which the duck could have jumped over the fence. No similar objects are in place on our daughter’s side of the fence.

Walking behind the duck, however, was simply too hard for the four-year old. Each time the duck sped up, so did the boy, accompanied with excited yells. When the duck got to me it was running full bore and when it realized that it wasn’t going to get around me it made a desperate leap and got to the top of the fence in an awkward imitation of flying. From there it glided back into its home territory, obviously relieved not to have the boy chasing it.

As we stood in the yard, laughing about the adventure, we felt the first drops of a light rain that has continued through the evening and into the night. The cool rain feels good in this land of what seems to us northerners to be perpetual summer. The locals are wearing sweatshirts and sweaters and jackets, but it seems quite unnecessary for us. We did bring our rain jackets with us, but haven’t felt a desire to put them on so far during our visit.

It was a gray day yesterday with a full overcast all day. Being a pilot and airport bum, I noticed the difference in the approach pattern of the F-16s at Shaw Air Force Base. The clear weather pattern involves a tight circling approach usually flown in pairs. The instrument approach is a wider approach flown in tandem with a lot more separation between the jets as they head in for their landing. Shaw has a lot of the fighter jets and they operate around the clock. I don’t know the specifics of Air Force requirements, but I’m sure that pilots need to remain current with instrument and night approaches, so they probably take advantage of cloudy days to make sure that the pilots are checked out to fly at all times in most weather conditions.

I’m surprised how quickly I adjusted to the round-the-clock aviation operations. I hear the jets when I am outside an awake, but they don’t wake me at night even though I’m used to sleeping with the window open next to the bed. I know that noise is an item of debate in neighborhoods near airports, but our daughter’s family home is well insulated and the sound of jets from the Air Force Base is not a problem. I doubt if the circling jets had any effect on the duck’s wanderings. I doubt that ducks make any association between their usual modes of transportation and the technologically advanced planes in the sky. After all these are domestic ducks and probably come from a long line of ducks that have never migrated.

Chasing the duck got me to wondering about the neighbor’s animals. I’m pretty sure they gather eggs from their chickens. They might also gather eggs from the ducks. I wondered if they butcher birds for the dinner table. They might also harvest pigs for meat, though their pigs are fairly small - more like mini or pygmy pigs. They might be Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. I’m no expert and really don’t know much about raising pigs, but I do know that there are several breeds that have been developed more for pets than for food production.

The neighbor’s pigs have not left their back yard, although some fence repairs have been required to keep them from digging under the fence. Our visit here will end in a couple of days but I do expect a full report from the four year old when pigs fly.