Duck hive mind

Nick Maloret’s account of a group of 10 ducks “waddling towards him” in South Harting [FT381:75] reminded me of a phenomenon that used to be observable in the Suffolk village of Westleton. The village’s duck colony on the village pond (it had an informal “duck warden” who kept an eye on them) used to be a ragtag group of mostly mallards, but also some khaki Compton’s, the odd Chinese water duck and the occasional Muscovy duck. On one occasion there were geese that attached themselves to the colony. What was odd about them was that they seemed to have a group hive mind; they would suddenly all waddle towards you on the village green (next to the pond) and surround you, quacking loudly. It was like something out of Village of Damned. On another occasion, a local moorhen joined in when the duck group hive mind surrounded me.

I once cycled with my girlfriend and her cat, up for his holidays and in his cat box strapped to a bike rack after being picked up with me from the nearest station. We took a quick break as we cycled through Westleton. It was a short while before the Westleton duck group hive mind started surrounding our cat in a box on the back of a bike. Our normally very bold tomcat went nuts, he totally panicked. So we cycled out of the village quickly.

Then one year all the ducks were suddenly weird-looking mallard/khaki Compton hybrids. (My late mother told me that variety of duck was called khaki Comptons – dark brown with a white chest.) They didn’t seem particularly fertile hybrids; there were only a few small, weirdlooking black ducklings that year. The next year, by contrast, they had many ducklings, most of whom survived. The Westleton duck colony still does its weird rallies and parades across the village green, but it’s much calmer now; it doesn’t seem to surround passers-by so much. The strange assortment of different breeds of duck (and the odd goose) seems to have left the colony too. It’s now mostly the standardised mallard/khaki Compton hybrids.

• Eric Hoffman’s review of Unexplained [FT381:61] asks what “the events at Skywalker Ranch [tell us] about the nature of reality”. The events at Skywalker Ranch, California, home of director George Lucas’s Lucasfilm and the production base for the Star Wars films, probably consist mainly of making films, especially in the Star Wars franchise. This should have been Skinwalker Ranch, Utah, home of all sorts of High Strangeness. Could an overactive spell-checker be the culprit?

Matt Salusbury

Dunwich, Suffolk