Hey tweets, here follows a thousand-word essay on the tufted duck. Hit
delete now if all you want is a list of birds:

Recently, my husband and I went out looking for the male tufted duck
that?s been hanging out in the Kent Ponds. For those of you who have never
seen a tufted duck, they closely resemble our own scaup, which have black
heads and chests, gray backs, and pale gray flanks. Tufted ducks have
white flanks and black backs.

Male scaup always look very tailored to me, like little businessmen
dressed for success. It would not be surprising to see them with a tiny
briefcase tucked under a wing, and a heavy schedule of appointments. But
the tufted duck is different from our own more buttoned-down scaup - it
has a streamer of feathers sprouting from its crown and flowing down its
neck. Picture a middle-aged rock star with a mostly bald pate and a long
mullen preserving his illusion of hair, dressed in a suit because he has
to appear in court for some infraction - that?s the human equivalent of a
tufted duck. A duck with attitude.

Last Saturday, my husband and I were among the hopeful birders trying to
re-locate this bird. It was a miserable day. Clouds blanketed the sky from
one end to the other, sniffling a kind of endless drizzle that first
covered us in a filmy mist, then got denser and denser until all the world
was one soaking rag. The flooded field was even more dismal. In my youth,
the Kent Valley was filled with dairy farms and woods. Now, industrial
parks have sprouted everywhere, transected by busy highways where cars and
trucks roar by. Passengers toss out the occasional KFC chicken bucket, or
sometimes their broken chair frames or wooden skids. The junk lies there,
rotting and rusting, despoiling the last few fields that still lie fallow
in winter. This garbage dump in the making was the winter resort chosen by
the tufted duck.

When my husband and I arrived at the 204th Street lookout point, we saw
nothing but native scaup floating in the flood. Our guy was nowhere to be
seen. We spent the next hour driving from one spot to another, scanning
the fields. Each field was uglier than the last. It was not nature as I
wanted to picture it. At one dike, a rat scuttled away as we stepped over
garbage and old cow pies. Some kids had smashed pumpkins nearby, which
were piled in a rotting heap that clung to our shoes. We were wet, cold,
and bummed out. ?Let?s go back to the first place we stopped,? said my
husband, Mr. Optimism. I was too depressed to argue.

Back at the lookout, we encountered three other birders. ?We think we have
the tufted duck in our scope,? said one. ?But he?s asleep. We can?t see
his tuft.?

I stared through his scope at a duck drifting peacefully in the flood, his
head tucked into his back. Slowly, the current turned the duck sideways. I
blinked. A breeze came up and lifted the duck?s little tuft, making it
wave like a miniature banner.

The clouds parted, the sun came out, Handel began playing his Hallelujah
Chorus in my brain. Well, not really. It was still drizzling, and no one
had removed any of the garbage. I?m sure the rat was still scuttling
somewhere. But none of that mattered. That duck?s little tuft waving in
the breeze erased all my depression. My spirit lifted to see this
outrageous, this gorgeous work of nature. Why a tuft? I don?t know. Our
scaup get along perfectly well without one. Yet here he was, tuft and all,
a real miracle right before our eyes.

Richard Dawkins once asked this question: What is a lion?s natural
environment? The savannah, he answered. A lion does best when it lives in
the savannah. Then what is our natural environment? he asked. It is
ourselves, he said. Yes, we live in nature and are subject to natural law.
But the bigger part of our natural habitat is created by us. It is our
relationships with each other; it is our culture.

I find Dawkins? insight to be a powerful idea. For if we create our own
environment, then we have the power to change it. A lion can?t do much to
make its habitat a better place, but we can make our world a better place
in an instant. We could decide ? tomorrow ? that we don?t want to live in
a world that puts materialism at the apex of our values. In one day, we
could take 75 percent of all our stuff to the dump and build a new
Everest. In one winter, that mountain of junk could be covered with snow
and made beautiful.

We could decide, today, that we don?t want to look at rotting pumpkins and
rusty chair frames in that farmer?s field anymore, and we could disappear
the ugliness in one afternoon.

Is it hard to change our world in this way? Some might say yes, on the
theory that cleaning up our environmental mess, or stopping war, or
persuading people to live spiritual lives instead of materialistic ones
means that we would have to enlist the support of millions of people. We
might have to change human nature itself.

But I say that human nature is precisely why we have the power to make any
change that we desire in our own habitat: the habitat of our beliefs, our
relationships, and our actions. The tufted duck we saw last Saturday is a
wondrous creature that evolved its beautiful tuft, its spanking white
flanks, and its neat black head over the course of many millions of duck
generations. We cannot create a tufted duck. But we can create a pristine
pond for him to sleep on. If we please.