Here’s an original avian aquatic tale from Chris Cole.

Once upon a time Sol the duck met Miriam the duck. Duck hormones soon won out and they fell in love. They got married and eventually had a family of little ducks to follow them around the lake. Two of Sol’s offspring were teenaged females who drove him nearly nuts with their incessant chattering. Wherever the family went, the two girls would yakkity yak an endless stream of jabber. (They might have been called jabber-walkies except they actually did most of their loud quacking while they were on the lake swimming…)

The family became so well known for the little chatterboxes that other ducks could hear them coming down the shoreline even before they’d rounded the bend — the noisey quacking told everyone they were approaching. “Here come Sol and his family,” they’d say to one another.

Well, the lake also experienced frequent fog banks and, unfortunately, boaters often could not see the ducks through the fog. Many ducks were unintentionally run over. The fogs were so thick the ducks referred to them as soup.

It turns out our adolescent jabbering girls were the perfect solution to this problem. Anyone wanting to cross the lake during a heavy fog simply invited the girls along. Their boisterous babbling clearly alerted boaters to their presence and thus saved many ducks. Soon the whole lake was enlisting their services.

Thus it became a well-worn aphorism around the lake that the best thing to go with a thick soup was Sol’s teen quackers.