Why not a Mallard? The 1928 Ford Model A, and a little, lost duckling

Today’s post is barely squeezing in before the midnight point.  It’s been a long day, folks, and kind of a sad one, too.  This morning, I found a little duckling sitting all alone in the middle of a parking lot when I was on my way to get some breakfast.  I checked around for any sign of his family, but couldn’t find them.  I worked all night, so I was awake in the wee hours of the morning and it was quite early when I decided to treat myself to breakfast, which was what brought me to that particular parking lot at what I would normally consider an ungodly early hour of the day.   

After narrowly avoiding parking right on top of the little lump that would turn out to be a baby bird, I got out of my car and  gathered up the little duck.  I had to wait about an hour and a half before the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Roseville would open for the day, so after the restaurant outside of which I found the duck gave me an A-1 steak sauce box and lined it with a nest of napkins for the duckling, we were off.  We stopped by my sister’s house to wait out some of the time we had to kill, and my niece and nephew got to see the little duckling.  The poor little bird was fading fast, it seems, and shortly after I got him to the Wildlife Center, he died. 

I don’t know anything about ducks really, or how to take care of one, so I’m not sure why my duckling died or why he was out in the middle of a parking lot by himself in the first place.  The people at the wildlife center said that ducklings so young are very fragile little souls, and that he was probably in some kind of shock even though he was chirping and moving around a bit.  I just hope my driving didn’t push him over the edge… we did have to drive through a morning storm to get to the center, but I tried to keep the ride as smooth as I could. 

They did say that he was a Mallard duck, and that even if I had brought him to  the duck pond that was about 6 blocks away from where I found him, he wouldn’t have been able to survive because ducks do not accept other duck babies into their broods.  Geese will, but ducks won’t. 

For today’s car post, I thought I’d track down some bird themed stuff.  Surprisingly, there is no car named after the Mallard duck… or any other kind of duck, actually.  One would think that some car manufacturer would have jumped all over this long before resorting to made up names for their products.  Perhaps somebody does, in fact, own the trademark for the name, but they haven’t yet made use of it.  There have been lots of vehicles that use wings in their emblems and lots that use birds, too.  Remember Eagles?  They had a whole lineup of vehicles including the Eagle Talon right before they went kaput.  There was the Toyota Tercel, which is another name for a male hawk, the Pontiac Firebird, the Ford Thunderbird, the Ford Falcon, the Buick Skylark, the Studebaker Hawk, the Plymouth Roadrunner, the Pontiac Sunbird, the Reliant Robin, the Packard Hawk, the Studebaker Lark, the AMC Eagle, Jeep’s Golden Eagle edition of the Wrangler, and the Ford Raptor. 

Not a duck to be found among the car names.  There is the old Cadillac emblem featuring the original coat of arms that had what looks like 6 ducks on it.  Those weren’t actually ducks, though.. Rather, they are supposed to be merlettes, which are kind of stylized versions of martins or swallows -songbirds.  These were sometimes featured in coat of arms and personal/family/national heraldry as a kind of historical shorthand or identification of heritage…  Well, merlettes or whatever, they look kinda like ducks.  Here’s what I do have for you though, and it’s about as close to a duck as I’ve got to offer in automotive tribute to the little duckling from this morning.  It’s the hood ornament from a 1928 Ford and it features a quail rather than a mallard duck, but it’s what we’ve got, and it’s a lot closer to a duckling than the Mustang that we used to blast through the storm to get to Roseville today. 

A 1928 Ford Model A was the successor to the Model T, and was a hugely profitable and important vehicle for the Ford Motor Company in its early days.  There were about 30 different configurations you could get one in, from a coupe, to a convertible, to a truck, to a wagon, which, if you think about it, makes them about as versatile as a duck, which can swim in the water, fly in the air, and walk on land. -Ford really ought to have had a duck on their hood ornament instead of a quail. 

The Model A was the first ford with the standard driver’s array of controls including clutch, brake and gas pedals across the board for their lineup.  They had steel wheels, drum brakes, and a roughly 3.3L 4 cylinder engine that made about 40 HP.  So, in honor of this morning’s little duckling, we’re going to say that the quail on the model A ornament is in fact a Mallard duck for the day.