Ducks and Eggs and Minnesota

I asked my niece Michelle Albrecht to write about her and little brother Steven’s adventures on a Minnesota lake when they were children. Her method of gathering duck eggs was unique and while not many of us were privileged to view and retrieve eggs several feet down in the cold, cold, clear water, it was undoubtedly a whole lot of fun. Thanks, Missy, for sharing!

Ducks

I grew up in the country with a beautiful clear lake right out our front door. My brother and I had Shetland ponies.  We each had a dog – his was a yellow lab, mine a pedigreed French poodle, although you’d never know it from  the way she would roll in any smelly thing that she could find.  We raised chickens and my brother had a bad-tempered rooster for a time.  And sometimes we had ducks.

Daddy was a science teacher in a small town and every now and then, for his biology class, they would get a batch of eggs to hatch in the incubator.  Now, this was an old-fashioned, galvanized metal round container, about 4-6 inches deep.  It had a small round window in the top about the size of jelly jar, that you could look into to keep tabs on what was going on inside.  That is how my brother became a mama duck to a whole flock of ducklings one spring! But that’s a story for another time.

Our chickens were very methodical and predictable in their egg-laying.  They each had their own nest up in the pony corral and they really never laid them anywhere else as far as I can remember. Those ducks, though.  They were a free-spirited lot if ever I saw one!  Seems they didn’t see the need to lay their eggs in the same place each day and would drop their egg wherever they happened to be at the time!  Usually this was in the lake.  Have you ever collected duck eggs from the bottom of the lake with a fish net? My brother and I have.  I have to tell you, it’s really a lot of fun!  We would take turns rowing our old wooden fishing boat all around in front of our house.  One of us would be up in the bow, leaning over to examine the lake bottom, with the net.  Now, you may not realize it, but duck eggs, at least our duck eggs, come in varying shades of blue and blue-green, not so very different from the bottom of the lake and the other things you might find there.  The lake bottom was also very soft and silty, so if you missed your egg on the first scoop, you had to paddle off to a different area while everything settled back down so you could see the bottom again.  Our lake was spring-fed, so we never worried that the eggs had gotten too warm and weren’t good to eat.  We had plenty of eggs for whatever we wanted to do with them – fried eggs for a Saturday or Sunday brunch, eggs for any baking I might care to do, but my favorite treat when we had an abundance of eggs was when Mom or Gram would make custard. Mmmm!

I don’t remember anymore how many eggs we collected that summer, but I do remember the sunlight sparkling like diamonds on the water as we paddled around, hunting for our treasures.–Michelle Albrecht