The Peabody Ducks

I know three things about ducks. It’s impossible to sneak up on them, they’re scared of umbrellas and they don’t like daylight savings time. These are the sorts of things you learn while hanging out with the official Duck Master of the Peabody Hotel in Orlando. He’s responsible for the Peabody Ducks, five famous mallards that entertain guests twice a day by marching down a red carpet to spend all day frolicking in the hotel’s fountain.

The March of the Peabody Ducks is a much-loved tradition that began in the late 1930’s at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. It began, like all good traditions, with Tennessee whiskey. After toasting a day of hunting with a few too many highballs, the hotel manager thought it would be fun to shock the guests by letting his ducks splash about the hotel’s elegant marble fountain. Far from being appalled, the guests were enchanted and the tradition lives on today at the Peabody Hotels in Memphis, Orlando, and Little Rock.

Each hotel has a duck team consisting of four hens and a drake. (Drakes are too competitive for there to be more than one in a group – even nature, it appears, loves a harem.) Following breakfast of romaine lettuce and live worms, the pampered poultry leave their glass and marble palace and waddle through the hotel into their specially-reserved elevator. They go down to the lobby, where they scramble down the red carpet accompanied by Sousa’s King Cotton March before plopping into the fountain. The Duck Master attired in a bright red jacket ushers in the ducks, his arms in a vee simulating the wings of a mammoth mallard.

Guests can call ahead to serve as honorary Duck Masters. As an honorary Duck Master myself (you get to ride in the elevator with the ducks), I feel obliged to let you know that you can’t sneak up on ducks because they have 360-degree vision, umbrellas scare them because they resemble swooping predators and as ducks are creatures of habit, daylight savings time just pisses them off. And don’t worry that you have to slum it to see the ducks; The Peabody is Orlando’s best hotel.

www.peabodyorlando.com