6 MARCH 13-19, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | What the Flock? MEET AMANDA BUXTON, DENVER’S OWN DUCK WHISPERER. BY JASON HELLER Amanda Buxton has her ducks in a row. “Closest to us is Basil. He’s the biggest, and he is a menace,” she says, pointing to one of four abandoned ducks she’s rescued and brought to her backyard in Edgewater. It’s a frigid winter day but the sun is out, and the birds are pecking away at a big bowl of green chickpeas. “You’ll see the other ducks being like, ‘Gosh, get out of here, Basil,’ because he’s just kind of a turkey sometimes.” She continues down the line: “Behind Basil is his brother, Pip. Pip used to get bul- lied, but then he got some balls. He doesn’t take any shit from anyone anymore, which is nice. And then you have the red-breasted one, Nigel, and his brother Ozzy.” When Buxton fi rst saw Basil, Pip, Ni- gel and Ozzy foraging around the shore of Sloan’s Lake in the summer of 2022, they were not eating anything as healthy as chick- peas — or much else, for that matter. “I was living right across the street from the lake at the time,” Buxton remembers. “A friend told me that she’d seen some ducks that looked domesticated down there, so I went over to check. And there they were. There were four of them, and they obviously had been dumped by their owner, and they were begging for food scraps from some picnickers.” Buxton took a loaf of bread to the park and started to toss out morsels. The birds were cautious at fi rst, but after a few weeks of her “food festivals,” as she calls them, “All I had to do was stand at the edge of the lake and go, ‘Hey, guys!’ Wherever they were, they’d hear me and be like, ‘Our treat mom is here!’” Honey buns, she notes, were par- ticularly tempting. Then autumn came, and Buxton’s work as a duck whis- perer intensifi ed. “It started getting cold, and I knew the lake was going to start freezing over,” she says. “Ducks have an oil gland on the back of their butts, and that’s what makes their feathers waterproof. When they preen, they’re rubbing that gland and waterproofi ng their feathers. That helps them stay warm in water. But when ducks are super skinny, they can’t oil themselves as well. Their circulation is different than ours, so their feet can withstand colder temperatures than our skin can. Still, ducks can get frostbitten feet.” She continues: “Domestic ducks can’t fl y away when winter comes. They’re bred to be heavier, bred for meat, so their bodies are a lot bigger in proportion to their wings than wild ducks’ are. That makes domestic ducks more susceptible to predators, mostly foxes and raccoons and hawks. They’re prey birds. But their eyesight is a lot better than ours. That’s why ducks are always looking up. They can see a hawk or an eagle miles up in the sky. “Finally I was like, these guys gotta go. I gotta get serious. So I contacted the park rangers at Sloan’s Lake, and I let them know that they would probably be seeing me with some elaborate traps, trying to catch these four dumped, domestic ducks. They appreci- ated the courtesy call.” Catching the birds wasn’t easy. When a domestic duck is abandoned in the wild, it becomes skittish and disoriented. Whatever comfort the bird once felt around humans turns to wariness. Most of the time, the ducks Buxton had found wouldn’t even come out of the water when she was near. Undeterred, she outfi tted herself with techniques and tools. In addition to using standard equip- ment like waders and nets, she learned to innovate with everything from paddleboards to remote-control speedboats. “There comes a point,” Buxton says, “where you’ve fed the duck all the meal- worms and peas you have, and they’re about to go back in the water. At that point, you have them trusting you. But you gotta be fast and just go for it. It’s a dance.” That dance is one Buxton has mastered. Buxton’s most unintentionally hi- larious duck-saving scheme was setting up a soccer net and trying to chase the birds until they were corralled inside. Ultimately, though, the ducks were so malnourished that a generous scattering of food was enough to lure the last of them to safety. Then came the question of where to put them. Few animal shelters in Denver will accept ducks, and even those that do — like the Denver Animal Shelter, operated by the Denver Department of Public Health & Envi- ronment — have extremely limited resources. “For me, shelters were the last resort,” Buxton says. “Shelter space is precious. I’d prefer to keep as much of that space open as possible for people who have no other options. And even then, the shelter would have to try to adopt the ducks out. There was no way I could make sure they were going to a good place.” For Buxton, there was only one alterna- tive: She took the ducks home. THE AVIAN FLU HAS LANDED Buxton’s fl ock of four is a relatively new presence in her life, but ducks in general are not. As a girl in rural Brighton, she was a member of 4-H, and ducks were among the many animals she grew up learning about and caring for. That love of living things never left her. Her house is more or less animal heaven — and a legal haven, since the City of Edgewater has issued a fi fty-dollar-a-year permit for Buxton to keep her ducks there. In addition to that waddling mob of Basil, Pip, Nigel and Ozzy, she owns a fl uffy orange cat named Tig and an enormous tortoise named Lucy who commands a bedroom of her own in Buxton’s house. “When we fi rst got the ducks,” says Bux- ton, a server at the Corner Offi ce downtown, “Tig would chase them around the yard. Then it was the other way around. Now the ducks are more likely to go after Tig. They do get kind of territorial.” Being territorial is one instinct that even domestic ducks retain. But beyond a few vestigial survival mechanisms such as that, domestic ducks are pretty much helpless in the wild. When raised for poultry and eggs by farmers with training, resources and at least a streak of ethics, domestic ducks have just one main predator to worry about: humans themselves. Cruelty, however, can take many forms. “The majority of dumped ones, especially in the spring, are just from people who saw a cute baby duck at a feed store and was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ It’s just an impulse buy,” Buxton says. “It’s never-ending. People are constantly just picking up animals and not thinking about the long term, you know? You need to have space for them. You need to have predator-proof housing. People don’t realize how fast they grow, the care they need, the messes they make. NEWS continued on page 8 KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS Domesticated ducks are often abandoned. EVAN SÉMON Amanda Buxton started rescuing dumped ducks at Sloan’s Lake in 2022. EVAN SÉMON
