I was given a pet duckling when I was a little kid (my second grade teacher gave kids eggs in incubators or ducklings to raise as a class project.)
Hey, it was suburban Ohio in the seventies... not many rules and even less supervision
The kids who had permission to participate in project quack were given the little fuzzy hatchlings in nothing more than a brown paper lunch bag to take home (I certainly can’t imagine this happening today!) The ducks came with a bag of duck food (some sort of grain meal if I recall correctly)and a sheet of instructions.
We bought our duck food from the teacher. After a few weeks I think my parents had enough of the quacking and occasional duckling oops surprise that I wouldn’t remember to clean up (I was only seven after all!j so they became less and less than enthusiastic about my new little buddy. They joked that the teacher was making a huge profit on the food, (a joke that fell flat in my mind, as I knew my teacher to be a kind woman.)
We eventually got a little hutch like cage made for the duckling when it got older but for the first few weeks it lived in a cardboard box in my room.
I was always happiest around animals, so I played with my duckling every day. We took walks around the yard as the duckling (I named it Dusty) imprinted on me like I was it’s mother...and it followed me everywhere.
There were several kids in my suburban neighborhood who had ducklings thanks to this teacher, and we would get together to swim them in kiddie pools/feed them worms etc.
I remember being very proud of the fact that I was a girl that had no qualms with picking up worms and feeding them to my duckling...I think it was even more exciting when I figured out how much it freaked my mother out to see her littlest daughter happily searching for creepy crawlies in the garden. I guess you could say I was a proud tomboy.
I only had Dusty for a few months, because we ended up moving many hours away- the teacher took it back to live on her little farm with her big flock. It was ages ago, and seems like a dream, but that was one odd facet of my Midwestern childhood. (Kettering Ohio)
