I haven’t much new to report. The Dude (Gregory) abides, despite regular inundation by foreign drakes. I’m beginning to wonder, since they look young and healthy, whether some of these may not be Honey’s offspring.
At any rate, Gregory is in the pond at all hours and in all weathers. He huddles on the “duck tub” in the rain, in the cold, and in the sun, waiting for his hen. The first three photos showing the Dude Abiding were taken from the window in my office:
Sometimes he swims about:
And this morning. . . SIX DRAKES. I chased them out, but of course had to chase Gregory out, too. But he always comes back soon
Gregory waits in vain, but is adopting you.
That duck island really ties the pond together.
The following are a non-birder’s uneducated questions (please treat my ignorance with kindness…).
Q1: Do wild ducks by being fed on a reliable and regular basis get ~domesticated, or at least so attached to their feeding pond that they will migrate back to the same place?
Q2: When the ducklings were fledging last fall, they all looked the same, i.e. female. Have they changed their plumage since to be clearly identifiable as colorful drakes today?
Hens growing to be Drakes? Perhaps I’ve misunderstood your Q.
Or young ducks that cannot be identified YET as either or?? – My wild guess?? since the ducks that left the pond last fall didn’t look like drakes, and now there’s a guess that the drakes hanging around the pond could belong to Honey’s last year’s brood.
I immediately got your meaning, as I’ve been thinking the same thing. The juveniles all look alike. I’ve been waiting with bated breath to see if any returns, bearing the white bib of their father, Frank.
I have a tiny pond, and a pair of ducks had been coming back each spring, until I stopped filling the bird feeders religiously. At any rate, it looked like the same pair from last year, and they headed straight for the mini pond even though it was totally covered up in snow and ice. There wasn’t enough food on the ground so they took off. There’re lots of huge ponds and vegetation nearby, so that’s probably where they went.
Their presumed father.
To quote someone from one or more of Victorian England, Republican Rome, or Çatalhöyük, “Maternity is a matter of observation, paternity is a matter of opinion.”
Though there is a possibility of sexually-effective patterning having a high heritability. I don’t know how strong that is in ducks.
The ducks hadn’t developed their distinctive coloration when they left, so I have no idea of the sex ratio at that time.
Those shiny green heads are fantastic ornaments.
Iridescent? In the sense of, a structural colour created by the mechanical structure of the feather keratin(s) versus a colour produced by a pigment within the material. I seem to remember that some game computer’s CDs required a black plastic substrate, so the black colour of the disc would be a pigmented colour, but the rainbow-reflections a structural colouration from the material’s internal structure.
I know that both colour types are options for tetrapod integumentary structures (someone really needs to settle the cladistics of the tetrapods. Trial by ordeal, maybe?), but which one, or both, for mallards … ?
Why do I get the image of someone trying to put a duck head into a CD player? ACCCCK.
More and more males! It starts to look like an invading army.
It’s mating season. There’ve been 3 or 4 drakes chasing a female around my neighbourhood. Looks like she’s settled down with one.
Do the invader drakes come when you call? I would think Honey’s babies would remember your call.
Rarely, but usually they’re either there or they don’t come. When Gregory is there alone, he tends to be scared of me (because he gets squirted), and so I rarely whistle.
I don’t whistle at all if there are more than two drakes in the pond.
I can see a paper coming out of this. I can see it now:
Equipment: Buz Bee Stingray Blaster.
One liter of distilled water.
Method: To keep unwanted males at bay, the experimenter aimed at the male canards and let fly with a strong enough spray to cause them to take flight. Thus, isolating the hen,…
Etc.
That’s an eminently experiment-needing question. It may have been tested previously, but the obvious strategies for duck farming, for example, don’t really go with allowing migration.
I’m sure there are plenty of anecdotes of the “my trained dinosaur remembered me!”, but you also need to measure the number of experimental animals that don’t respond to the call. That pretty much dictates a whole-brood ringing strategy.
You’d need …. hmmm … I’ll rethink that.
Changing the “attention signal” put out by the experimenter year by year (e.g. X-ray Spex this year ; the Vapours next year) would help differentiating ducks responding to Call1, Call2 and [human noise].