Tuesday duck report

Allow me once again to enchant/bore you with photos of my babies. The ducklings were one month old on Saturday, but they entered the pond the next day, so their official “monthiversay” as pond denizens was Sunday. They’re in their second month now, and are rapidly growing feathers and longer wings. By the end of another month, they’ll be on the verge of flying.

First, some photos and then two short videos. (Click the photos to enlarge them.)

Miss Duck continues to be a terrific mother, always in attendance with the brood. Here she is overlooking them last Friday as they rested after “Second Lunch” (they get fed three times a day). They’re now too large to all fit atop the Sacred Rock that you can barely see peeking over the pond edge in the middle, and so they must rest on the edge itself.  They are now large enough to leap up to the edge.

Note the feathers; they are looking like miniature ducks:

The family resting yesterday on the west side of Botany Pond. The “babies” are together and Miss Duck, of course, is nearby.

Below: a close-up of three babies, who get more and more feathered each day. I’m now told that you can sex the babies with fair accuracy by looking at their bills. If they have yellowish-orange corners, they are supposedly female, while black or brown corners denote males. According to that lore, the duckling on the right is a female, and the two others drakes.

In the photo just above (click to enlarge it), there appear to be two hens and two drakes, with the two hens being the middle two babies. A nicely sex-balanced brood.

And, just to remind you, here they are just a month before, at two days old. How they’ve grown! I needn’t add how much joy these changes bring to me; though they lose their cuteness, they become functioning ducks who can fly off and see the world.

And let’s have a hand for Miss Duck, Mallard Mother of the Year.  Here’s a closeup from the group sitting above. Note that the distal corners of her bill are orange. The dark color of the bill, with an orangish tip, will be a diagnostic phenotype I’ll look for next year when hens return to the pond. She also is more grayish than most hens, which usually have a brown cast.

This is Honey the Duck from 2023, looking more brown (and also more spherical):

The video below was taken last Sunday after Second Lunch. Although the ducks are usually full then and head to the south island for a postprandial rest, they are often a bit frisky for a short period and dunk, swim underwater, and zoom in the water. Here the whole family, including Miss Duck, gets the zoomies, apparently set off by Miss Duck taking flight at the beginning.  Then the babies zoom after her and, when she flies back, zoom in her new direction.

Their little legs and feet must be paddling furiously when they go this fast; I’d love to have an underwater video of these zoomies. Note 12 seconds in when two ducklings flap their stubby little wings. Little do they know that those stubs will soon be carrying them up to the sky!

This short video shows Miss Duck pecking at both a turtle (1 second in) and then a fish (11 seconds in) at feeding time. Neither species poses a threat to her or her babies, but I guess in nature some turtles (like snappers) and some fish are dangerous to the brood. Miss Duck, not knowing the difference, is, I think, following her evolutionary imperative and simply driving away anything of a size that could have been dangerous over evolutionary time.

And a screenshot from the PondCam showing visitors admiring the turtles on the north island and the duck family arrayed on the east side of the Pond. Be sure to watch the PondCam from time to time; you might even see me at feeding time (6:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. or thereabouts, all Chicago time) giving the ducks their comestibles.