You wanted zoomies? Well, you got ’em! Here’s the brood on June 11 doing a bit of postprandial zooming. It’s not absolutely predictable, though the probability of this behavior is highest after mealtime in the afternoon. It usually begins with one duck going underwater and swimming, and soon the rest follow, seeming to race each other across the pond. I keep my camera close by, ready to take video if I see imminent signs of the zoomies.
While this looks like “play”, it’s probably practice for flying and flapping their wings: eventually they’ll take off if they do this. As for whether the ducks are really having fun—getting pleasure out of this behavior, well—all I can respond is to utter the sentence that Jake tells Brett at the end of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
The babies are nearly five weeks old in this video. It’s hard to imagine when they were helpless little fluffballs!
We’ll have a longer post with videos and duck pictures on Sunday.
Flying (the best they can at this stage) just for fun! Soon, flight will be serious business.
Reminds me of teenagers drag racing.
Thank you. I love their zoomies. They are so big!
Those zoomies make my heart laugh!
Great to see!
🐥
They grow so fast! 🦆🦆🦆
Whoa! I was NOT prepared for that.
Their wings have grown so fast! As I recall, it wasn’t much more than a week ago that their wings were just pathetic little nubbins.
Of course they enjoying it, why would they do it otherwise? The divergence between the dinosaur/bird lineage and the one leading to humans was obviously early, probably more than 200 million years ago, but my strong suspicion is that feelings of “good” and “bad” would have been such evolutionarily valuable mediators of behaviour that they probably appeared very early in the evolution of multicellular animals. Some scientists, like Ginsberg and Jablonka put the beginnings of consciousness much earlier – possibly in the Cambrian.
I find, even among scientists, that the idea of the human/animal distinction is so heavily embedded in our culture that we lose sight of the commonalities that must exist between ourselves and non-human animals.
Came here to say something like this, but you said it much better.
Except that I missed a word out – “they are enjoying it”. And I should have mentioned that the Cambrian was more than 500 million years ago, for those who aren’t familiar with the geological table.