I cannot give much of a duck report because we have no ducks. The pond seems bare and bereft of life, with a few scraggly plants eking out a dreary existence in what is basically a tub full of algae. (A guy comes over once every two weeks to scoop out the algae, but that scares the ducks and they fly away.)
They also removed the duckcam over a month ago, promising that it would be back in a week. It wasn’t. The ducks make the pond, and even though it’s somewhat scenic, though missing many plants, there also needs to be animals there to keep it alive. I am sad and don’t know what to do, though we have expressed some of these sentiments to Facilities.
Our one duck, who showed up for one day on Wednesday, was Hazel, who was here two weeks ago with her hen friend Dolores. Both hens were in the pond and having a good time, eating, sleeping, and swimming together. Then the Algae Cleaner showed up got into the pond in his waders, and scared both ducks away. (This is his job, so it’s not his fault.) They did not return. But if they keep putting people into the pond to remove algae with nets, it becomes a no-go place for ducks and dangerous for ducklings.
This past Wednesday Hazel showed up, but she was very skittish, would barely go into the water (it does contain algae-reducing chemicals, which aren’t supposed to harm ducks), and would eat only a few duck pellets by sitting on the shore and leaning over to pick them up from the adjacent water. You’ll see that in the video below.
Here’s Hazel, and below is proof that it was she who had returned. She’s a lovely duck:
Was it really Hazel? Here’s the bill of the duck above, photographed on September 3:
And here is Hazel’s bill photographed on August 24. It’s a perfect match. Bill patterns are the fingerprints of female ducks.
Hazel eating from the bank. When a group of tourists came by, they all converged on the area with their cameras, photographing ONE DUCK. They don’t do that when there’s no wildlife. As I said, THE DUCKS MAKE THE POND. And although its formal name is “Botany Pond”, everyone knows it as “the duck pond.”
I just schlepped down to the pond with my bag of duck food, hoping against hope that there would be someone to feed. And then I schlepped back to work, with not a pellet dispensed. I am depressed and wonder if the pond will ever be full of life like it was before the renovation. There are supposed to be fish and turtles, too, but they haven’t put them in, though someone’s put one goldfish in the pond. I hope it’s not hungry.
I’m too low to write any more posts today. We now have a habitat unsuited to our beloved ducks.
No! How can they not be attracted to all the duck lovers who frequent the pond? And the lovingly pelleted duck food, so rich and delicious. Perhaps this is a blasphemy, but maybe you can import some ducks at some point. Or would that not count?
No, we can’t do that; we’re not allowed to touch, much less move, wild mallards. Violation of the Waterfowl Protection Act.
Oh well. They’ll probably find the pond eventually. How do they choose their homes? There must be a dispersal mechanism or set of dispersal behaviors. Otherwise they’d never populate new habitat.
Darn. I’m so sorry about the state of the pond. Maybe it will take a year or two (and some fish and turtles) to get back to its old form.
The science of re-creating healthy ecologies in artificial ponds is pretty well advanced – as I learned firsthand from an ex who dug out a pond from scratch in the backyard. This pond was much smaller than Botany pond, but very healthy and mostly algae-free, with an amazing amount of life (all native): including lots of frogs (and tadpoles), turtles, fish, etc (unfortunately, it was too small to attract ducks). Anyway, I would think that with all the great minds at UC, restoring Botany pond to its former liveliness wouldn’t take too long.
+1 but you said it much nicer than I would have, Brooke. Certainly biology at uchicago has the expertise to do this right. Just another example of incompetent management all the way through the top in not accessing the subject matter expertise and executing.
I think it can take time for the ecology to set in. What exists now will change. But I think too that it needs steering.
+2. Maybe facilities needs an informal advisory committee of Dr. Coyne, an ecologist or two and some biology students to advise it on the best ecologically natural measures to take to return the pond to a duck haven. The Bring the Baby Ducklings Back to Columbia project continues.
“… the water (it does contain algae-reducing chemicals, which aren’t supposed to harm ducks)”
Perhaps true, but even if it merely creates offensive odors or anything like that – to ducks – that would be sufficient to make ducks find another pond.
I.e. the ducks would not be harmed because they simply flied away.
Was the additive in the water with the previous duck family? Esther and Mordecai, I believe?
All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.
—Paracelsus
1538
There was no additive until all the ducks had gotten big (they might not even have added it before they left; I can’t remember).
Our solution for the pond at work back in the 90s was to add a bale of barley straw, which did work, and there are barley straw extracts that can be added to ponds if you don’t have room for a bale. Prior to adding it someone had to row out periodically to remove the curtains of weed that were choking the ecosystem (the pond was known as the lake because it was a very big pond, being the surface water drainage for the land around the factory but it supported freshwater fish that fed a Kingfisher and Heron, not to mention the gazillion Greylag Geese that liked to breed around it).
Ah, Paracelsus, an early adopter of modern-ish medicine. Reading the text of the quote I at first feared it was from Junior (toxins and all that); he should have been given the name Bombastus.
Unless the algae is clogging up the pond and making it anoxic, I don’t right away think it’s a problem. The algae is a basis of a growing food web.
But perhaps a bunch of snails will keep the budding ecology stable. It should have snails, in any case. I thought there was crayfish as well? So those would be good to add, and they also eat algae.