The Wildlife at Sandpiper Bay

Sandpiper Bay Golf Course in Sunset Beach, NC, provides an unprotected but quasi-managed home to birds and animals, the most entertaining of which are the domesticated Muscovy ducks. Over a year ago to help with course maintenance, the Golf Course Superintendent Jay Varallo imported the ducks who have since lived up to their feathery end of the bargain. However, with their numbers dwindling from roving bands of wild coyotes, foxes, and other predators, their future there remains questionable.

While some Sandpiper residents try to protect the ducks as best as possible by providing indiscriminate deterrent scents of mountain lion and wolf (natural enemies of the predators), others find the ducks annoying and cheer for predators to kill as many as they can. Who knew a golf course could harbor such paradox.

Time will tell if the Muscovy experiment finds its balance in nature. For now, residents supporting the ducks enjoy and protect them as best as possible. Predators (two and four-legged) continue to eliminate them. Meanwhile, the surviving ducks remain focused on their duck things, just trying to exist by putting one webbed foot in front of the other. We humans can learn from that.