Mr. Pilling’s Pond

By Patricia Nikolina Clark
Photos courtesy of Charles Pilling and the author

Charles Pilling was always interested in birds.

Charles Pilling was only twelve years old when he dug his first duck pond—using a shovel and a wheelbarrow.

“I was always crazy about birds—all birds,” Charles says. “When I was a kid, if I saw a bird I didn’t know, I would jump on my bicycle and ride over to the University of Washington Museum. I’d look at all the mounted specimens until I found the bird I had seen. Then I’d read all about it. They didn’t have all those fancy field guides then, you know.”

He laughs. “My poor mother. Whenever she needed me for chores, I was off in the woods looking at birds. She finally got a police whistle, and when she wanted me for something, she’d stand at the back door and blow that thing until I came.”

Then the family doctor gave Charles three crippled mallards, and Charles suddenly needed a good place to keep ducks. The pond he dug, about ten feet across and three feet deep, was on his father’s dairy farm near Seattle, Washington. That was more than seventy years ago.

Mr. Pilling with a Siberian goose.

Today, the pond is larger. The farm is gone, and the city has grown outward and around the pond. But Mr. Pilling is still raising ducks on his pond. In fact, he is known as an expert on breeding certain kinds of ducks.

Mallards and Wood Ducks
In the 1920s, soon after young Charles Pilling had created his little pond, he had a whole flock of mallards living on it. But people who worked for the state Fish and Wildlife Department noticed the birds. “They told me I couldn’t raise ducks without a permit, and I was too young to apply for one,” he says. “So they took away all the ducks except my original three.”

Charles wanted to study the science of birds, or ornithology. But when he graduated from high school, his family had no money for college. He took a job delivering coal to homes by carrying it in sacks on his back. At night he kept enlarging his pond and learning more about birds on his own.

The Fish and Wildlife Department finally gave Charles a license to keep and breed birds. He was now a young man, and he wanted to raise wood ducks, which were scarce at that time.

At last, he was allowed to keep a live pair. But first he read everything he could about wood ducks. Then he watched how wood ducks nest in nature.

He learned that they laid their eggs in dead, hollow trees, sometimes using abandoned woodpecker nests. One day he sat in a boat, hidden by reeds, and watched a wood-duck nesting area. When three young wood ducks came swimming toward him, he sat very still as they came close. He watched as they picked insects off floating lily pads and ate seeds that had blown into the water.

“That was an important discovery for me,” says Mr. Pilling. “I realized that baby wood ducks depended on insects and seeds in the water.”

Mr. Pilling’s pond today.

Back at his own pond, he immediately used this new information. He made nesting houses out of an old rotting log. Then he sent away for mealworms and crickets, which he kept in his freezer. Finally, three years later, he had healthy baby wood ducks in his pond.

Wounded Ducks
In 1951, someone gave Mr. Pilling a wounded female hooded merganser. Her injury was on one wing, and the wing had to be amputated. Since she couldn’t fly, she stayed in or near the pond. Mr. Pilling’s search for a male (or drake) hooded merganser ended four years later, when a friend sent him one that was injured.

“That drake was in pretty rough shape,” he says. “It had a badly broken wing and shotgun pellets in its hip.”

Mr. Pilling kept the injured duck in his house, feeding it fish and shrimp mixed with game-bird feed. “I had to push all the food down his throat with the eraser end of a pencil because he would not eat by himself,” he says.

After three months, the drake finally began eating on its own. Mr. Pilling put him out on the pond and introduced him to his mate. They took to each other, and the very next spring the female laid six eggs. Mr. Pilling knew that hooded mergansers had never been bred in captivity before, so he was elated. But he took the eggs away from the mother and put them under a bantam hen to hatch.

“That sounds mean, but see, in the wild, those ducks pick a secret place to nest—away from all the other ducks,” he says. “In my little pond, they can’t get away. The mother spends so much time driving away other ducks that she neglects her babies.”

The banty hen made a good incubator—and a good mother—but Mr. Pilling couldn’t leave the ducklings with her for more than three weeks after they hatched. Being a land bird, the hen would have taught them to stay away from the water.

Feeding Ducklings
“It was a real hassle raising those baby mergansers,” says Mr. Pilling. “The babies refused to eat the same food we had fed the baby wood ducks. So I went back to watching them in the wild.” He shakes his head. “That’s how I learned that baby mergansers have to see their insects moving. They won’t recognize dead insects and eat them like the wood ducks did.”

Many different species of water birds live in Mr. Pilling’s pond.

So Mr. Pilling went to streams to collect freshwater shrimp and tadpoles. He laughs about it now. “The little ducks would eat those like crazy! Then one time I went over to Puget Sound and collected a bunch of sand fleas. I’m telling you, I was awful busy trying to keep those little ducks alive.”

He succeeded, and the young hooded mergansers thrived. His achievement brought him instant recognition from ornithologists.

Today, Mr. Pilling proudly displays three First Breeding Awards. He received them from the International Wild Waterfowl Association for being the first person in the world to breed three kinds of ducks in captivity: the hooded merganser (1955), bufflehead (1964), and harlequin duck (1977). In 1990, he went to Nova Scotia to be inducted into the association’s Hall of Fame—only the fourth person to receive that high honor.

Now he gets calls from all over the world for his advice about breeding ducks, and every spring, ornithology classes come from the University of Washington to see the many different species of ducks and geese on his pond. The man who couldn’t afford to go to college now teaches college students about birds.

Mr. Pilling takes care of a banty hen, which is a good incubator of duck eggs.

The Pond’s Future
Mr. Pilling keeps a cyclone fence around his pond. Kids linger there on their way to school, and taxicab drivers park at the curb to watch the pond activity while they eat lunch.

Now eighty-five years old, Mr. Pilling worries about what will happen to his ducks when he is gone. Last fall he noticed a boy—about fourteen years old—who spent a lot of time at his fence watching the ducks and geese. He began talking to the boy.

“The kid was crazy about ducks,” says Mr. Pilling. “He reminded me of myself at that age, so I gave him a pair of wood ducks. That boy raised ten babies his first year!” His eyes crinkle in a secretive smile. “Maybe I’ve found my replacement.”