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By Ed Wetschler

The five ducks at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, are the most popular ducks in the world (sorry, Donald). Over the years, hundreds of thousands of people have watched them march, if “march” is not too dignified a term, through the hotel to the marble fountain in the Peabody's Grand Lobby every day at 11 a.m. And their fans gather again each day at 5 p.m. to watch the marching ducks waddle back through the lobby toward their home on the hotel roof. All this, of course, to a John Phillip Sousa marching tune.

A few days ago, after I'd spoken on a panel about social media at the annual Historic Hotels of America meeting -- held this year at The Greenbrier, in West Virginia -- I sat down with Peabody manager Douglas Browne. My quest: to learn how he gets his ducks in a row, so to speak. After all, my dog won't walk in a straight line. And dogs are supposed to be smart.

“First, you have to understand that our ducks – all mallards -- live on a farm until they come to us,” he explained. “We keep each set of five ducks for just 90 days so we can return them to an outdoor environment before they become too domesticated. After three months of service, they retire to the farm, where they can march to the beat of their own drummer.”

Jack Daniels and the Ducks

The tradition started in the early 1930s, back when it was legal to use live decoy ducks for hunting. One day Frank Schutt, the manager of the hotel at that time, returned from a hunting trip that had turned into a Jack Daniels trip. With him was an equally inebriated hunting buddy, and they decided it would be great fun to march their decoy ducks into the hotel fountain. Inadvertently, this was a stroke of genius, because the guests loved it. So what the heck, Schutt kept on doing it – marching the ducks, that is, not hitting the bottle. And almost 80 years later, the Peabody ducks are still making a splash.

But something lurking in the back of my mind was bothering me. “Don't any of these ducks ever end up on a plate in your French restaurant? Maybe a nice pate, or duck breast, or duckling a la orange?”

“Never, because we haven't served duck since 1981," said Browne. "Our French restaurant, Chez Philippe, may well be the only French restaurant in the world that won't serve duck.”

The Duckmaster General

That's probably just ducky with Jason Sensat, the Memphis Duckmaster -- yes, that's his title. Sensat (top right), who was raised in a military family, is in charge of instilling a bit of esprit de corps and discipline in the mallards. But Browne has a novel theory about that.

“The ducks aren't perfectly trained,” he admitted. “But they are so popular, and there are so many people lined up along their route to see them, that they have nowhere to go but in a straight line.”

I must try that with my dog.