The Gifts of Baby Duck

Ann McLeod has a cabin on Sturgeon Lake in Northern, AB, and there one summer, she found a duck’s nest containing seven eggs. The following week, when she wanted to show the nest to her granddaughters, she found that the nest had been destroyed and the eggs gone, all likely the work of a predator such as a fox or coyote. This incident provided the basis for the story in The Gifts of Baby Duck, but, in this case, one egg survived and hatched. In the first of what McLeod suggests may be “a nature series featuring animals that live by Sturgeon Lake in northern Alberta, Canada”, McLeod anthropomorphizes this animal mother and son pair while interweaving factual information about mallard ducks.

In the tale, Baby Duck is initially teased by a mink for not belonging to a “typical” large duck family and later for having “just plain brown feathers”. A killdeer also comments negatively on Baby Duck’s appearance while bragging that she has “a fancy while collar around [her] neck and you do not.” Mother Duck, aware of her son’s disquiet, reassures him that:

[W]hen you are bigger, your head will change from a dull yellow to an iridescent purple-green colour that will shimmer in the sun like a jewel. And you too, like the kildeer, will have a bright, white band around your neck.

Mother Duck then goes on to explain that Baby Duck has been given three special gifts:

Most creatures in the world can only walk, swim or fly, but you are able to do all three! You can walk, you can swim, and you can fly!

Baby Duck points out that he can’t fly, but Mother Duck responds that “in fifty sleeps she would teach him how to fly” and that “[e]very year he would fly to a warm place called ‘Mexico’ with hundreds of other ducks.”

Mother Duck has, however, saved sharing one final gift that Baby Duck will possess in the future.
She told him that many creatures of the world are never heard. They have no voice or they can only make quiet sounds. But Baby Duck had a voice that everyone would know. It would be a voice so distinctive that little children would want to make the sound even before they could talk.

At Baby Duck’s insistence, Mother Duck loudly demonstrates that sound and essentially closes the book.

The book’s final four pages consist of three “Questions for the reader”, a two-page “Glossary – 10 New Words!” and brief biography of the author and the illustrator, each accompanied by a colour photo. The words in the glossary are a mixture of nature-related terms (bulrushes, duck down, kildeer) and descriptive terms (haughty, iridescent, wily).

The illustrator, a 15-year-old, has utilized a cartoonish illustration style with his artwork appearing at the top of each page and McLeod’s text below. Occasionally, there is more text than the art can adequately carry. Though the ducks were presented anthropomorphically, Moriarity needed to pay more attention to a duck’s anatomy and not having a duck’s leg bending like that of a human. And when Baby Duck is being teased about his brown feathers, he should be shown as brown, not yellow.

The Gifts of Baby Duck imparts factual information about mallard ducks while touching upon life issues such as bullying and our need to recognize the gifts that each of us possess. While the book’s ending is somewhat abrupt and flat, the younger end of The Gifts of Baby Duck’s audience will enjoy the warm mother-child relationship.