Raleigh’s ‘Duck Man’ delights downtown with this one-of-a-kind parade of quacking pets
On cool October nights, downtown Raleigh gets treated to a spectacle that is both adorable and ridiculous: Tyler Allen strolling with his pet duck, LaQuisha, who waddles furiously behind him, quacking at the sluggish city.
As he crosses into Moore Square, the crowd forgets the jazz band wailing onstage and rushes over to pet the web-footed curiosity who begins pecking at their shoes.
“She’s classy,” Allen explains. “She’s cultured. She likes jazz.”
Once a crowd of 20 has flocked around him, Allen unzips his shoulder pouch and pulls out the bonus: a two-week old duckling, the color of Big Bird, who scurries in circles around his ankles, peeping at the skyline.
“They think I’m the mama duck,” he says.
Another in a long line of Raleigh characters
By day, Allen works as a molecular biologist at Duke Cancer Institute — a PhD from N.C. State University who traffics in therapeutic stem cell behavior.
But in his off-hours, Allen scoops his ducks from the kiddie pool on his West Raleigh patio and carries them downtown until the streets get more walkable, more friendly for waddlers. On any given day, a passing motorist might see him toting Ronald, Donald, Otis or LaQuisha — along with the yet-unnamed baby.
“I hatched them from eggs,” he says. “They spent 28 days in the incubator. And here we are.”
At 30, Allen joins the august ranks of Raleigh characters come and gone: the No-Hand King, who rode hands-free wheelies on a bike decked out with American flags; Chrome Dome, the 53-year-old man who pedaled up and down Leesville Road under a shiny silver helmet; the Bunny Man, who toted a pair of emotional support rabbits down Fayetteville Street inside a baby carriage.
Nobody has officially tagged Allen as “Duck Man” yet, except me, but his fan base is growing quickly enough to require such a nickname.
As the Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble tore through Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Air Shaft” on Thursday, a fan approaches carrying a champagne flute and a fresh strawberry.
“Do they like strawberries?” she asks. “C’mere, sweetie. Oh, she’s got quite the wiggle!”
LaQuisha commences to force half a strawberry down her long white throat and then nibble at the woman’s bracelet.
“She thinks your jewelry’s food,” Allen says, and a dozen more onlookers bombard him with questions.
“Is this a duck?”
“Is that your duck?”
“Do you sell ducks?”
“Is this the same duck you brought last week? Is this LaQuisha?”
Toddlers scramble around, fingers grabbing, and Moore Square turns to a blur of flapping wings and Keds.
“They’re very popular,” says Allen, as LaQuisha squares off with a Chihuahua. “A lot of people have never interacted with a duck before. The wild ones tend to run away.”
Why ducks?
Ducks, science has shown, can be imprinted, or raised to see a parental figure in the first thing that enters their eyesight as chicks. Konrad Zacharias Lorenz won a Nobel Prize for describing this very process.
But why would a cellular biologist living in a Raleigh condominium adopt a flock of winged pets, ordering their eggs by mail?
The fascination dates to parakeets he had as a middle-schooler. Allen hoped to graduate to parrots, but his mother in Durham thought those big birds unmanageable, so his duck binge is an outgrowth of his childhood avian enthusiasm and a desire for talking pets.
At home, they peck at his window, hungry for watermelon and grapes. They stay mostly in a converted dog house on the porch, paddling around their kiddie pool until it’s walk time.
And when he heads toward downtown, duck tucked under his arm like an absurd briefcase, Allen gives Raleigh the parade it so desperately needs — a touch of irresistible fun.
