Ducks make their home in $100,000 hotel penthouse

Have you ever stayed at a fancy hotel and thought to yourself, “This hotel is great, but what it could really use is a formal procession of mallard ducks marching up a tiny staircase into a lobby fountain?”

Of course you have. Who doesn’t think this literally every single time they stay at a hotel?

The problem is that most proprietors don’t act on this service-industry essential.

Except for the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. They get it.

Every day for the past 80 years, five lucky ducks exit their $100,000 hotel penthouse at 11 a.m. and make their way down to the Peabody lobby in their private elevator.

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As Oddity Central notes, that’s when the real show begins. Once those elevator doors open, the ducks – four hens and one drake – line up on a red carpet behind their trainer, a person appropriately named the Duckmaster.

As the opening strains of John Philip Souza’s King Cotton March start to play, the well-trained birds begin their famous march down the carpet, up a quartet of stairs and into the fountain, where they lounge and swim around like the ducks they are until 5 p.m.

That’s when they reverse their ceremony and head back up to their rooftop suite for the night.

According to the Peabody’s website, this spectacle was the brainchild of Frank Schutt, general manager of the hotel during the 1930s. One weekend, Schutt and a friend took a hunting trip to Arkansas and over bottles of whiskey, they decided it would be hilarious to put a couple of their live decoy ducks in the hotel fountain.

No doubt the ducks also preferred this arrangement to their alternative career choice of sitting in a pond while their human slavemaster picked off their friends and relatives with a shotgun.

Schutt started with his three decoy ducks and the idea proved so successful that he eventually expanded their ranks to five. In 1940, a circus-trainer-turned-bellman named Edward Pembroke volunteered to train the ducks to march in time to the fountain and became the Peabody’s first official Duckmaster.

Though dozens of ducks have since held the illustrious rank of “professional avian marcher,” their popularity has remained steady since the beginning. Droves of people stay at the Peabody just to share a temporary residence with the marching ducks, and they’ve even appeared on Oprah.

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And because sometimes the universe is kind, no duck has been served on the Peabody’s French restaurant menu since 1981. That should erase the karmic debt accrued by Schutt’s original duck-based activities.