The Peabody Ducks

BirdNote®
The Peabody Ducks
Written by Mark Bramhill

Mark Bramhill: This is BirdNote.

Twice every day, a rapt audience gathers at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee to see six local celebrities.

Five of them are ducks.

Kenon Walker: Ducky duckies!

Mark Bramhill: The sixth is the hotel’s head Duckmaster, Kenon Walker, who leads them in “the Duck March.” Each morning, Kenon goes to the roof, into the two-hundred-thousand dollar “Duck Palace” to retrieve the talent.

Kenon Walker: Alright y'all, I got everybody warmed up for you down there. Now we gotta go march some hope into that lobby and put some smiles on some faces! All right. Here we go, y'all!

    [Quacking, ducks move past microphone]

Kenon Walker: Good. There you go. Watch your step, y'all. Very good!

Mark Bramhill: He leads the ducks to the elevator, signals to the lobby to start the John Phillips Sousa music.

    [Elevator door dings; march music can be heard]

Kenon Walker: Alright duckies, here we go.

Mark Bramhill: And when the doors open, the ducks march down a red carpet, up some steps and into the hotel’s ornate fountain.

Kenon Walker: Everybody say, “Good morning duckies!”

Audience: Good morning duckies!

Mark Bramhill: The ducks swim about the fountain until the afternoon, when the Duckmaster marches them back to their palace on the roof. People travel from all over to see this surreal local tradition.

The Peabody Ducks go back to 1933, to an incident involving the manager of the hotel, live duck decoys for a duck hunt, and a bit too much Tennessee whiskey. Guests were charmed to find ducks swimming in the hotel fountain the next morning...

Kenon Walker: And it became a tradition to have ducks live in the fountain. But the bellman had to take care of them. So in 1940 a man named Edward Pembroke was hired as a bellman. Uh, it just so happened that he used to be an animal trainer in the circus as a young man. So it was him who came up with the idea of turning the tradition of ducks living in the fountain into a ceremony.

Mark Bramhill: As the first-ever Duckmaster, Edward Pembroke trained the birds to do their daily entrance and exit marches. And he did that job for fifty-one years, retiring in 1991.

Over that time, the Peabody Hotel became synonymous with its waddling waterfowl. These days, the duck motif is everywhere in the hotel. You go into one of the rooms?

Kenon Walker: I look at the wall, there's a painting of a duck. I look at the pillowcases, there's three ducks on the pillows. Go to the bathroom, there's duck shaped soap. There's ducks on the towels. There's ducks on the toilet paper!

Like, even when you go to the restaurant, you get the burger. They like sear a duck logo onto the top of the bun. There's ducks everywhere!

Mark Bramhill: The only place you won’t see a duck? On the menu, at their fancy French restaurant.

Duck: QUACK!

Mark Bramhill (As though responding to the duck): You’re right, it would be rather tasteless.

Mark Bramhill: Now, I need to acknowledge something: these are not the same ducks from 1933. Not just because the hotel started with English Call Ducks and Edward Pembroke switched to Mallards… or that ducks do not live 90-some years. But in fact, these aren’t even the same ducks as three months ago.

Each team of ducks serves a three-month term. Two weeks before their tenure ends, a local farm the Peabody has worked with since 1981 delivers six new rookies to train how to march, use an elevator, swim in a fountain — you know, the basics. Six, because chances are that one of the ducks won’t take to the whole march-in-front-of-lots-of-people thing.

Kenon Walker: So they send me a backup duck.

Mark Bramhill: Two weeks later, the farm picks up the outgoing veterans and one stage-shy duck, and the rookie team understudies get promoted to leading roles marching to-and-from the lobby each day. They do this whole changing of the guard thing so that no duck spends too long in the spotlight; this way they can still go back to life outdoors for many more years.

But when they first arrive, Kenon needs to build rapport with the rookies.

Kenon Walker: When the new team gets here, they're scared. And what I've come to find out is, when you talk to them, when you get them used to your spirit, your presence, your voice, they become excited to see you.

I talk to them, I have pep talks with them. I'm like, “Hey, hey, hey. I know you're scared. I know you're scared, but I'm not gonna hurt you. I'm not even gonna touch you, but I am Duck Master Kenan, and you, you're the chosen ones. You’re the new team of world famous Peabody Ducks. Now, it's my job to break you from this state of fear, to where you are marching together with such pride as worthy of a red carpet entrance in that lobby downstairs.”

Mark Bramhill: The ducks have their own personalities — some excitedly greet Kenon when he arrives at the Duck Palace each morning, some are more standoffish. And it’s easy to get attached to these animals — Kenon’s predecessor gave him advice on this:

Kenon Walker: He said don't name them, don't hand feed them, don't get too attached to them, cause we gotta let them go in three months. But if I gave you a puppy for three months and said hey, don't get too attached to this puppy. I gotta take him back in three months. You're still gonna get attached to the puppy, right? So I named all of them. So the first team, the male was Howard. And I named the four female ducks after my four aunts. So I had Diane, Gail, Frankie, and Sarah. I even invited my aunts up to meet them. I was like, “that's you, that's you, that's you, and that's you.”

But when it came time to switch them out for the new team, man, I was heartbroken, man. I really, really was. So I was like, nah, let me stop naming these ducks. That way we won't get too attached to them.

Mark Bramhill: Kenon is the hotel’s seventh Duckmaster, and these are the two-hundred-something-th team of ducks.

    [Drum roll]

Mark Bramhill: But while the faces may change, you can be sure that every day, ducks will march proudly in and out of the lobby of the Peabody Hotel.

    [King Cotton March, sound of ducks]

Mark Bramhill: For BirdNote, I’m Mark Bramhill.

###

Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Recording by Mark Bramhill
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2024 BirdNote August 2024
Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID# PeabodyDucks-01-2024-08-14    PeabodyDucks-01