FROM PRESS REPORTS: For 14 years, oceanographers have been tracking the travels of thousands of bathtub toys, all victims of an accident on the high seas. A container load of twenty-nine thousand rubber ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs went overboard in 1992 in the middle of the Pacific. Pushed by winds and currents, the toys were carried to Alaska, where thousands washed ashore.

But hundreds more were swept up thru the Bering Strait and so far north that they would become frozen in the Arctic ice. Moving slowly with the ice across the Pole, scientists predicted the rubber ducks would take five or six years to reach the North Atlantic.

Now, 16 years after being dumped overboard, some ducks have appeared, bobbing off beaches from Maine to Massachusetts. There are thought to be many more ducks waiting to be found along the East Coast of the United States, and elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and all the way, perhaps, to Europe.

MOBY DUCK

I was born a rubber ducky,
but I wasn't very lucky:

At an early age, they dumped me in the sea!
It was callous, it was cruel,

I'd been destined for a pool —
or a bathtub — where I'd bobble, pleasantly.

But instead I faced an ocean
with its constant wavy motion.

(A seasick duck's a truly awful sight!)
So I soaked in salty water

for much longer than I ought'er,
and it bleached my yellow body nearly white!

From Shanghai to Yokohama
I was crying for my Mama

when I caught a wave that took me northerly.
After months it was my fate

to drift through the Bering Strait,
past Point Barrow to the frigid Beaufort Sea!

Well, I spent the next six years
packed in ice up to my ears,

moving east a little when it thawed in summer.
I had frostbite on my feathers

from that awful Arctic weather.
(I know about "Cold Duck" — and it's a bummer!)

I at last emerged one day
into Northern Baffin Bay.

(Have you ever seen goose pimples — on a duck?)
I was so inured to ice,

even Greenland seemed quite nice;
still I hoped that the Atlantic changed my luck.

Then a giant barracuda
swallowed me north of Bermuda!

(Indigestible, I got barfed up one day.)
But while in that 'Cuda's mouth

I had made good progress south
to the balmy waters of Montego Bay!

The Pacific was terrific,
and the Arctic quite cathartic.

The vast Atlantic too, impressed me greatly.
But for little rubber quackers,

it's as clear as cheese and crackers:
Jamaica is the best place I've been lately!

So I'm floatin' in this Bay
in the hope that one fine day,

some kid will pick me up and take me home.
And let me tell you, Bub:

If his family's got a tub,
then nevermore is this duck going to roam!