Readers’ (and writer’s) wildlife photos: Ducks ‘n’ stuff

Although I have a fair number of wildlife photos from various readers, I can always use more, so please think of this site if you have good wildlife photos. I’m showing some of my ducks today, so I thought I’d post Stephen Barnard’s latest photos, which also include a brood of ducks he’s following. First, some other pictures, with his captions indented:

Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum). One of a pair feeding in a Russian Olive tree. I can’t tell what it’s holding in its beak. (Males and females look similar.)

Yellow-headed Blackbirds (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus):

And his ducks:

I’m pretty sure this is a Gadwall (Anas strepera) hen with eleven ducklings. It’s difficult to tell female Gadwalls in summer plumage from Mallards, but the opinion of my local birder group is Gadwall.

Of course I asked for pictures of the brood as it got older, and worried about attrition, as Stephen thought, with good reason, that some would succumb. But I got this photo yesterday with the title “Still eleven gadwall ducklings.” Yay!

And this morning: “Still at eleven”.  Huzzah!

My own brood of four mallard ducklings (plus Mom; all Anas platyrhynchos) is doing well; the four have lost all their down, are starting to flap their wings, and yesterday I heard one of them quack for the first time (they’d been making peeps). It won’t be long till they abandon me. In the meantime, they’ve learned a new behavior to forage off the shallow cement floor: bottoms up! While in this position, they paddle backwards with their feet to remain inverted:

Finally, we had a visitor to the pond about two weeks ago. It’s a small pond, so imagine my surprise when I saw this Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) there, probably stopping on its way north. This is a zoomed iPhone photo, so it’s lousy: