Ducklings, Buddha and Golf

As I tried to get my mind off the latest politics of the day, my mind drifted back to late last September. We were preparing to leave to go to the US for our weekly golf trip. As we had not seen each other for a week we talked about what had happened. Steve told us that he had chased away a duck, which appeared to be nesting, from the property he was looking after on instructions from the Strata manager. When Steve looked at the nest he discovered 11 eggs. He said after he tried to catch the mother and failed, he took the eggs home and he and his wife were trying to decide whether to incubate the eggs and allow them to hatch or throw them away. He asked us for advice on what to do.

We were all full of suggestions and advice, some bad, some good, some revolved around eating the eggs, raising the ducks for food or contacting Ducks Unlimited for advice. In our musings, our conversation drifted to how different religions would give advice and the ideas of Buddha, and Karma came up and we speculated about what would happen.

We went to the golf course and started the game, as we moved from hole to hole, we kept up the conversation and the joking about the duck eggs. Naturally, as the game went on, whenever we had a bad shot or a bad hole we attributed the event to the bad Karma that we said had engulfed us for talking about eating the soon to be born ducklings.

At the 16th hole, Steve hit a very high shot and hit a bird, knocking it from the sky. The bird was knocked down and Steve thought he had injured or killed the bird. As we walked toward the bird, we realized it was a bit stunned, and it soon flew away.

My comment to Steve was that if he had killed the bird, he had 11 others that were soon to be hatched and he was 10 up on the count. I found out later that Steve and his wife had hatched the eggs (only 4 ducklings survived) and they gave them away to a local expert. I expect these stories to occupy our games when we start golfing in the Spring. At least the duck and bird story took my mind off of politics and the Canucks (our local hockey team), for a while.