Man and His Transgender Service Duck Get Blacklisted from Buc-ee's

Justin Wood is no longer welcome at Buc-ee’s.

Wood brought his service duck to a Tennessee store and is now blacklisted from the American convenience chain’s 50 or so locations.

He posted a video of the incident on his Youtube channel back in January when it happened. The story was recently picked up by publications across the country.

The video shows Wood wheeling the duck around the store in a stroller, and people were pretty happy that there was a duck in the store. Wood documents his multiple interactions with store employees (“red shirts”) who try to get him and the duck, whose name is Wrinkle by the way, to duck out. But they couldn’t really find a legit reason to make them duck off. Sign up for our free email newsletter for more bird puns, at some point probably.

One female employee who stopped them said that even if it’s a service animal, “you have to be able to contain it.” Then Wood asked if he could put it on a leash, and the employee said “if you have a leash, yeah,” at which point Wood pretended to put a leash on Wrinkle and the man and his bird pal waddled off.

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Then they headed towards the checkout line and that same employee told him the cops were waiting outside.

“They’re requesting you be banned from the store,” said a cop who really didn’t want to be there and obviously thought the duck was cool as hell. “It’s not my decision and everything, it’s their decision. It just says that you’re banned from all Buc-ee’s property and everything.”

I wonder if they would have treated this duck so poorly if they knew who Wrinkle was.

In 2021, the three-year-old Pekin duck – who is biologically a boy but goes by she/her pronouns (Wood’s words, not ours) – broke the Guinness World Record for being the duck with the most Instagram followers; at the time she had 350,000, beating out Ben Afquack‘s record of 79,467. Now, wrinkle has 721,000 followers on Instagram, 2.75 million Youtube subscribers and a whopping 4.2 million TikTok followers.

If you’re wondering about the pronoun preference, as we were, the website – seducktive.com – explains it like this:

Biologically Wrinkle’s a boy,

But her preferred pronoun is she/her.

And we can all respect that.

It’s hard to tell a duck’s gender when they’re under 3 month-old,

so we registered her as a girl for Emotional Support Animal

because the strong female energy,

also, Wrinkle’s drake feather has always been ambiguous.

If you want to learn more about Justin Wood, and perhaps get to the bottom of his need for an emotional support duck, you can follow him at @justinwoodcircus on Instagram, where he claims to be “The #1 Juggler in NY.”

According to ESA Care, which offers emotional support animal letters from licensed mental health professionals, ducks “do a wonderful job at improving one’s mental health” – even though they “don’t often pass as emotional support pets.” But, according to the site, ducks are great because “They are convenient,” “They are intelligent,” and “They are fun to watch.”