When I walk to work each morning, I take a minute to inspect the newest crop of ducklings at Botany Pond, the manmade (and beautiful) pond outside my building. I count them to make sure that none have disappeared the previous day (sadly, that happens). This morning I filmed the mother and a few of her offspring; they’ve now learned to come to the edge of the pond for feeding when a human approaches.
You can hear me greet them at the beginning of the video; I have a habit of greeting birds and squirrels in the morning.
Dear little things 🙂
& I always greet ducks & voots & swamp hens and the occasional goose, heron, spoonbill & ibis – but the birds of Hyde Park are being weaned off human feeding. It tends to kill them 🙁 Something about bacteria in the water and rising tides of botulism, I think. Esp in summer.
I don’t feed them, much as I want to.
Yeah, feels hard, but at least the Hyde Park birds have learned – & more importantly, so have the people
Oh, dear. My daughter loves to feed the Canada geese and ducks (an occasional swan too) at our Symphony Lake when we attend summer concerts. Perhaps it’s time we stopped. Lots of people do it.
or even coots – I have no idea what ‘voots’ are – except for a particular species of typo :-/
Well, c comes next to v on my keyboard.
You sed: “I have a habit of greeting birds and squirrels in the morning.”
Oh…Kay…
but do they greet you back?
He’s finally quacked!
Mind you, I expect that you could get more sense out of them than some undergraduate students I have met! 😉
RE: `… disappeared the previous day (sadly, that happens)’ … sad, yes, but if it didn’t happen, the world would soon be knee deep in ducks.
Is that a problem?
on feeding ducks
on Make Way for Ducklings
Thank you for that first link. There is a local pond near one of my older relative’s houses. We never see bread or anyone feeding the ducks there, but the ducks do paddle over to us when we walk by, which makes me pretty certain other people feed them.
I fully intend to let our 2-year-old do a small bit of feeding the couple of times per year we visit Auntie. But based on that article, I will pick up duck feed from our local pet store and use it very sparingly.
They’re adorable. Our local pond only seems to be inhabited by 3 males this year, so I’m missing out on the cute fuzziness.
I think it’s amazing that, no matter what the topic, there’s probably a video posted out there. Feeling a little separation anxiety, I decided to check to see if there was a vid of the ducks my darling (who found Butter kitteh) sees every morning, spitting distance from where she’s staying.
Lo and behold…
A NSFW video starring Isabella Rosselini, teaching about evolution and duck copulation. I’ll just leave this here. (tiptoes off…)
Thanks! That animated view from the tip of a duck’s penis was especially edifying.
(*faints*)
Me too! “Good morning, squirrelies!” “Good morning, little Ratso!” (my favorite squirrel) “Good morning, Mr & Mrs Cardinal!”
And I do feed them, because it is my back yard.
The day always is off to a good start when the critters come to my birdbath. There are even 3 partial albino robins in the neighborhood. I’ve never seen that many. Isn’t that rather unusual? They are definitely 3 different robins. One has a completely white tail, another a large white breast spot, and the third a spattering of white drops. If albinism in robins occurs at a rate of 1:30,000, it seems to be very odd to see so many. ‘Tis a puzzlement…