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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

When Deciding the Fate of an Injured Animal, Ducking the Issue Is Sometimes Best

Seth J / flickr
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CC BY-SA 2.0

Yesterday afternoon, as I was driving home from the hardware store, I saw a car coming the other way stopped in the road. The driver, an older woman wearing glasses, had gotten out of the car and was standing in the road looking back at something. I stopped abreast of her and she pointed at an object on the road behind her.

“Look,” she said. “It’s a duck. I think it has a broken wing or something.”

It was indeed a duck, a female mallard with its characteristic blue speculum, or wing-patch. It was walking at the edge of the road, and I wondered if it had come up out of the nearby Pole Dike Creek. I could not see any trailing wing, and it appeared to be walking normally. In fact, it didn’t seem to be in any distress, or even discomfort, except for the fact that it didn’t take flight when we approached it.

“I’m not sure what to do,” said the woman.

I told her about Wild Care, a local organization in Eastham that treats injured wildlife. I said I would call them, which seemed to put her mind at ease, but I knew I was lying. After she left, I drove on.

Nonetheless, it set off that familiar debate in my mind about what one should do about injured wildlife, and what obligation one has, if any, to such a one in a given situation. Take this duck, for instance. Mallards are probably the most numerous and widespread of all our common ducks. They can hardly be considered an endangered, or even a threatened species. Moreover, most local mallards are not truly “wild” wildlife. Instead, they have become semi-domesticated and non-migratory, and have interbred widely with black ducks, which are wild and migratory and threatened.

I confess to harboring mixed, even conflicting feelings about injured or even dead wildlife, depending on the species and location. I once plucked and roasted a ruffed grouse that had broken its neck flying into my picture window. One winter there was a stranding of some forty blackfish that lay on the beaches of the bay shore in Eastham. They had come ashore the night before and lay there, all facing north, in the frigid air. It was another example of a natural mass death, a common enough occurrence here, of another common, non-endangered species. Sad, perhaps, but nothing I could consider what the local papers called a “tragedy.” And because I could do nothing about it, I found myself looking at the scene and involuntarily thinking, Hmmm – forty tons of fresh-frozen whale steak. Had it not been for the Federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, how many of us might have been on that beach collecting cetacean meat for the winter?

Twenty minutes later, out of lingering guilt, I returned to the place in the road where the woman and I had first encountered the female mallard.  It was nowhere to be seen. If in fact it was injured, I hoped it might have died a quick, natural death from a coyote or fox, or perhaps that someone of a more compassionate nature than I had come along and stopped to rescue it. Likely, however, neither of these scenarios had occurred. In any case, I was once again spared the dilemma – or deprived of the opportunity, depending on your point of view – of deciding its fate.

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.