Home > Swampland > Archives > 2008 > April > 16
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Swampland People: Ed Schute
So there I was, wandering around Kenyon Bailey Garden Center, in the back looking for my friend Calvin, and I see a bin of ducks.
“Do they get along with chickens?” I asked a man standing there.
“I dunno,” he says, “Let me ask this guy.”
And over walks Ed Schute, 83, resident duck expert. I ask him the same question, he says sure and then I ask him whether the Peking (the one in the photo) is a male or female.
Ed holds the duck up to his ear and listens intently.
“This one is a drake,” he says, referring to a male duck.
Ed says he can tell whether a duck is a hen or a drake by listening to a sound they make in their throats.
“If it’s a high pitched sound it’s a hen,” he explains. “If it’s a low pitch it’s a drake.”
Ed is Kenyon Bailey’s resident duck man, I suppose. He says he was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania and grew to love ducks and chickens and still raises a few.
“I just never got out of the practice,” he says of raising farm fowl.
I enjoyed talking to Ed because I’m a chicken convert, with three at home laying eggs and taking on individual personalities so distinct that they are becoming loved pets as well; I don’t see eating Rosie, Yellow Feet or Bleep in the future.
Ed says he’s an all-around guy at the garden center and when people have a duck question he’s the go-to guy.
He came to Elizabeth City by way of Westchester, Pa., back in 1979. He married a woman from Pennsylvania whose son was finishing his time in the Marines and had married a girl from the area. So Ed and his bride came south.
Since then, Ed has remarried and he and his wife Cynthia live in a mobile home where they can’t house his ducks or variety of chickens. He says they live with a friend; he has to have those farm fowl in his life, he says.
“These are my life,” Ed says, looking fondly at the ducks.
So I found out that if I want to add a duck to our menagerie Ed is the man to talk with, the duck man, a regular guy making his way around Swampland.
