I believe this one was on Friday evening:
And—good news!—the mother mallard in the pond outside my building has brought a whole badelynge to fledging. In nearly every year, all the ducklings are killed by feral cats, or simply disappear, but now we have eight teenagers (mother and seven shown here):
yeah, those latter are your snapping-turtle victims. They love poultry and hardly ever get any.
Damn cats!!!!!!
Badelynge – that could be the secret word for WEIT posters. Is it Welsh? (Noted in passing too, same table lists flush or sord for mallards – who knew?)
“Who knew?”
Exactly. I’m extremely skeptical of these lists of collective nouns. A “shrewdness” of apes? Seriously, who ever says that? Thinking these up is basically a word game for hard-core language nerds and has nothing to do with actual usage.
Well, congratulations to Mama Mallard!
I saw a pair of ducks (male & female) playing in a puddle on the corner of 56th and Ellis (near Ratner) a couple of months ago (I even took a crappy cell phone picture). I wonder if those were the same parents.
It’s fun to watch ducks watch raptors.
Not for the ducks.
–From Wiktionary
–From http://fugitivemiscellany.blogspot.com/2009/11/badelynge.html
Just two of many hits in a search. Fun word; and with the pronunciation given above it even sounds apt!
(Advance apologies for any blockquote errors; I’m never sure if such spaced excerpts will work or not…)
If ‘paddle’ (intransitive verb) were formed as the diminutive of ‘bathe’ (i.e. to do so in shallow water, without full immersion), we could infer that ‘paddling’ is just the same word as ‘badelynge’. i.e. rather than the latter being a lost word, it’s remained in use with regular modern spelling.
(Online dictionaries and my old Concise Oxford say there is no agreed etymology for paddle except for it being probably Germanic, but this is my theory which is mine)
Oh, nice ducks.
That’s sort of what I was thinking! 😀
O, you skeptics, thinking those are ducks in the second photo. Look at the “V” formation. That is a fleet of UFOs.
That’s the mother ship standing in front and then a squadron of subordinate, duck-shaped UFOs arrayed behind her.
Lovely word, badelynge.