2398. Wool over their eyes

Henri and Minerva were eight and nine respectively. Henri had a brilliant idea.

‘You know how those couple of wild ducks in the paddock don’t care about sheep? They waddle around the sheep without a care in the world. Whereas the minute we appear they fly off. So what if we pretended to be sheep? We could catch the ducks.”

Henri and Minerva put on large raincoats, even though it was a sunny day. They began crawling towards the ducks on all fours.

“Baa!” said Minerva.

“Baa!” answered Henri. They were certainly realistic sheep.

When they got within roughly a hundred yards from the ducks, the ducks flew off.

The experiment didn’t work.

“I have no idea,” said Minerva, “why the ducks still knew we were humans.”

Dear Reader – let me interrupt. As the narrator, interrupting a story is something I rarely do, but in this case an exception has to be made. As a hobby-scientist I feel duty bound to point out a fact: the ducks flew off not because they thought Henri and Minerva were humans. They flew off because they thought Henri and Minerva were ducks, and ducks don’t go “Baa!”