The Eyes Have It

     "Did you know the Long-Tailed Duck has orange eyes?"

    What a question! She almost didn't answer, resisted the urge to laugh, or even better, snort. What did she--or he, for that matter--know about the color of duck eyes, or bird eyes, or the eyes of any creature? Of course she didn't know that ducks, long-tailed ducks, had orange eyes.

    She smiled, looked up from the paper, her own blue eyes wide and innocent, and said, calmly, "Of course I knew that. The Long-Tailed duck is known for the distinctly orange hue of its eye, set off by the circle of white down that circles each orb. Quite striking. The pupil, of course, is black, but the orange of the surrounding iris permits it to sense their preferred fish eggs and mollusks--a well known fact."

    She paused, looked up to see if he was still listening.

    He was and was waiting to see where she would go next, amazed, she assumed, at her erudition...and what he called her fantasies, the phenomenon she called her quick response. They had been married too long to fool each other. She was used to his nonsensical questions, and he to her quick answers. Obviously, there was no such creature as the long-tailed duck and who ever got close enough to see the color of any duck's eyes?

    "The orange eye matches the color of the beak, an effective concealment in the arctic tundra it inhabits, a kind of camouflage," she said.

    "Of course," he said, and they went back to the paper, both of them smiling.