The Mallards of Lewisburg

The sun is beginning to rise over the southwest corner of Montour Ridge, part of the Nittany Mountain. It's a brisk February day with a light wind blowing out of the northwest. The lights in two buildings come on and a few men stumble out into the near freezing morning air. They look toward the south and coming into view is the familiar sight of a flock of mallards. They're coming for the morning meal.

The mallards descend into a small pond inside the camp, as sky divers finding their target, and settle on the water. Once down, they march out of the pond to the sound of a call AAH..., AAH..., AAH..., AAH... . The caller is John Moore, an inmate at the camp for a little over a year. The ducks waddle to the caller, who is baiting them with small pieces of bread. Nothing unusual to the experienced camper who knows that mallards, although very wary of people, can be easily domesticated. But this is not a usual camp and the caller is not the average camper.

We are at the Lewisburg Extension Camp, affectionately referred to as LEC, part of the federal prison archipelago in Central Pennsylvania that houses over 5,000 inmates. One such unfortunate is John, who has cultivated the following of over seventy ducks, who depend on him for their daily bread.

The mallards start to walk toward the call, which entails climbing a six foot steeply sloped embankment that surrounds their pond. Three heads appear first, then the rest of the bodies follow. They march in groups of fours or fives toward John and the bag of bread he is holding in his weathered hands. "I call them my babies," he says lovingly. "I started feeding them when I was watching a football game." He's referring to the field where inmates play tag football. Pretty soon twenty or thirty mallards are marching four abreast crossing a macadam path to reach their caller.

A classic looking duck with a plump body, spatula bill and webbed feet, nature favored the male ... Drake to the mallard cognoscenti ... with a green head, a white ring around his neck and white outer tail feathers. When combined with the brown back, black rump, chestnut breast and grayish belly, his beauty is far superior to the female counterpart, which is mottled brown all over. When the sun catches them crossing the path it accentuates the male plumage. And you sense why man has been trying to capture the artistic talents of mother nature. As if by some grand design, the orange legs and an iridescent violet specular,

shiny area ,on the wings, bordered by black and white, make a perfect balance to its other colors.

This is usually a gregarious duck except in breeding season, of course. Normally the mallard diets on aquatic plants, seeds and grain. But here at the camp they eat bread. While researching the mallard for this piece I

came upon a story on the Internet site Nature.net. Tia, in a chat room, told of a group of mallards that adopted a town square. They became so used to eating bread thrown by the local townspeople that they became a nuisance and health hazard, a normal occurrence . The town decided to destroy them because they were unable to adapt to a changed environment. Someone on the web, no pun intended, proffered a solution. Feed the mallards a diet of mashed corn seeds mixed with bread and cereal. And leave some of the feed along the edge of the pond at their new home so they may get to taste some roots and plants that grow around water. Then they will return to a normal diet. There is little risk of closing LEC.

The mallards have to traverse an open meadow of about thirty yards on their way to the feeder. They must cross a black top walkway used by he inmates. Sometimes their paths cross. And instinctively the inmates know the ducks have the right of way. So it's not unusual to see twenty or thirty inmates queuing up for the ducks to complete their journey. And you can guess how many inmates believe they are master duck callers. But these mallards march to only one drummer and are never distracted by the cacophony of imitators.

Once across the walk they must waddle for about ten more feet to reach the end of the rainbow. There stands John with an open bag full of bread collected from the inmates, who have finished th morning meal. "The guards tried to stop me," he says. "Combs said it was OK to feed the ducks with bread from the chow hall," referring to the benevolent Administrator of the camp. He reaches into the bag and grabs a handful of bread and as if in one motion the feed is in the air and on its way to the hungry mallards. Now the orderly formation separates into a feeding frenzy and ducks fight for their daily bread.

John starts to walk toward the mess hall to begin his own feeding ritual. Attentively the birds re-group into tight formations of five abreast and follow John. They remind you of films of World War II marching celebrants down the Champ-Elysees after the liberation of Paris. "There were eighteen when I started feeding them. Now there are seventy one. They laid eggs by the flagpole in front of the Big House," referring to the Lewisburg Penitentiary where the violent criminals are housed that is served by the campers. "The one with the white on his chest is the drake. Now there are two of them," he says. John is referring to a hybrid mallard, which is a cross breed with a black duck. Some experts have concluded that the severe decline in the black duck population in the northeast was caused by the crowding out of the black duck by the mallard through cross breeding.

"They're pairing off now. The big male with white on his breast and the smaller hen. She is brown and he is black." When I asked him if he really knew the proper names for the male and female he replied "I don't know what they call the damn things. All I know is there are males and females." During the breeding season the ducks leave the pond for the safety of the nesting sites along a stream that run through the camp property on its way to the Susquehanna river. The female selects the nesting site, which is defended by the drake. On her own, the hen builds the nest, incubates eight to twelve eggs and cares for the young. The chicks are able to leave the site soon after hatching. And all the inmates are hoping they will return to the pond and find another prisoner to take up the gauntlet. The breeding season runs from April through early June. The eggs are buffish-green and hatch in about twenty -eight days.

John Moore is a seventy-four year old black man, who has probably heard too many love songs and lived too many broken hearts. John is five-feet four inches tall and has cotton white kinky hair. When he walks you think he is on a ship listing to starboard. He's the kind of person who is like a cheese left on the table too long, hard on the outside but a very soft interior once you get into it. You wonder why a man like this is in a federal prison camp.

The brown khaki uniform he wears looks like it never left his body. And the soiled sleeves of his union suit are visible just below the cuffs of his shirt. There is a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, of course. And when he removes it to speak, what you hear is not the twang of a north easterner, but the slow gravely drawl of someone raised in the deep south. He came to New York City in 1962. Before it was politically incorrect, you might say that casting

would call him for the Uncle Remus part in Brer Rabbit. But his feeding call is music to the mallards ears, even though the duck calling fraternity would probably cringe and Orvis & Co. would not be threatened by it. The mallards come to him as if he were a modern day pied piper.

The inmates never walk in formation, unlike the ducks who always seem to be marching in small squads. Occasionally, the mallards confuse an inmate with John and play a game of tag. If the inmate walks toward the mess hall, the ducks walk toward the mess hall. If the inmates stop to talk, the mallards stop and quack at each other. When he resumes his journey the ducks are sure to follow driven by that insatiable desire for bread.

Suddenly, as if by some mystical calling, the ducks spring straight off the lawn and head southwest toward their sanctuary down by the creek. They'll be back for the evening meal, when the ritual starts all over again.

John has been feeding the mallards for a little over a year. "Everyday has been my best day since I started feeding them," he says. They have grown and despite his advanced years one hopes that John has grown from his experience. He's had to cope with the daily rigors of institutional living and the barbs of his fellow inmates, who taunt him with comments about the bread being too hard, the feed too sparse or the amount thrown to the ducks, too much. Or they try to mimic his call to the mallards at feeding time. "You don't look like no duck, you look like a fool," he says to no one in particular.

The mallards will have to get by without him because release date is finally here. On missing them when he leaves, "Oh hell yeah, I'm trying to figure out a way to get them to Central Park, they're better than most inmates," he says mournfully.

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