Category: animal behavior

Duckapalooza! Big Sunday duck report

June 15, 2025 • 11:30 am

Oy, how the ducklings have grown! Remember, today has been only 40 days since they hatched on May 6.  In all respects save their inability to fly, they are slightly small adults, though they still hang together as the Brood of Six. Here are some photos and videos taken over the last two weeks.

The pictures and videos below are presented chronologically, and were taken on four days: June 1, 5, 7, and 11. You can see the change in the ducklings over a period of only ten days: they’ve lost most of their fuzz and are mostly feathered, and their wings are getting larger.

Mother Esther, June 1:

More “babies”, if they can be called that. Esther stands on a plant pot and watches her offspring:

On June 1 the ducklings were growing feathers, most notably on their wings.

A video of ducklings leaving the water on June 1 for a postprandial grooming session and then a nap. They are able to leave the water and jump on the pond edge very easily now.

More preening on the same day:

And, after preening, they often form a clump o’ ducklings, keeping warm and together. Esther, as you see, is always nearby.  They’re also nibbling at the grass:

A single duckling giving itself a thorough cleaning.

By June 6, the ducklings had developed more extensive feathering, especially on their breasts. They look to me like little dinosaurs, which of course they are:

And they look quite plump after feeding, often with their craws hanging over the edge of the pond. We call these “Dali ducks”. But they are not fat.

The babies dunking themselves on June 6:

Father Mordecai, who hasn’t been around for a few days:

After dining, swimming, diving, and preening, the ducklings plop themselves down for a nap. I love the plopping:

On June 7 we had a bout of postprandial zooming:

Esther the Queen:

Esther always does thorough ablutions, for as mom, she has to be in good condition. (Soon she’ll molt and gradually lose her feathers, replacing them with shiny new ones. This process is gradual so she is not of course bald!)

Meanwhile, Mordecai, when he was there, would drive other ducks out of the pond. Here he subtly but insistently forces Haman the Evil Duck out of the pond:

By June 11 the ducklings had gotten almost all of their feathers, but their wing feathers are small and they can’t yet fly. They’re also a bit smaller than Esther, but not by very much. Here’s one sunning on a rock:

Duckling ablutions:

Dabbling. They seem to get some food from the pond, and I’ve seen them slurping down algae.  Here they all seem to have homed in one one area:

Homing as Esther watches:

A big-time case of the zoomies:

A duckling. It’s now hard to tell them from mother, and at a distance you have to concentrate on color (Esther is lighter) rather than on size. There’s just a bit of fuzz near the tail, but otherwise they are fully feathered. I predict they’ll be flying in two weeks.

As a reminder, here are two of them the day they hit the water: May 7:

Here I am hand-feeding a stray hen, who we call “Hoover” because she comes right up to us when we’re sitting and cleans up all the duck food spilled on the ground at feeding time. I felt sorry for her and gave her a handful of food, which she quickly grabbed, one pellet at a time. I don’t really want to feed her, but when a duck looks straight at you  with their beautiful faces and liquid eyes, it’s hard to resist. I am not feeding these stray ducks much at all, and they are often gone (eating elsewhere, I hope). Photo by Elsie Holzwarth:

Ducklings flapping and zooming

June 13, 2025 • 11:15 am

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.

The remarkable foldable wings of insects

June 9, 2025 • 12:41 pm

Reader Kevin sent me this 4.5-minute video about two species of insects, earwigs and rove beetles, and how they fold their wings. It’s amazing, and I knew nothing about this. To quote Kevin:

Yesterday I saw this remarkable video on wing complexity in beetles and it really astonished me. Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but wanted to share it in case you haven’t. They guy has loads more great videos on his channel, too.

I sent the video to reader Robert Lang, among the very best origami experts in the world, thinking that he’d be interested in the folding. But of course he knew all about this (and more), for his folding knowledge and interests are wide, including designing a lens for a space telescope that can be folded up inside a rocket.

This all demonstrates Orgel’s Second Rule: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” Natural selection sculpted these folds, presumably to allow a flying insect to scuttle through the leaf litter.

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Readers’ wildlife photos

June 9, 2025 • 8:15 am

Today we have two photographs from crack bird photographer and retired medical entomologist Scott Ritchie, who lives in Cairns, Australia. His captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Note: the bower is not a nest, though many people think it is. In fact it is simply a structure designed to attract female bowerbirds—an “extended phenotype” of sexual display, as Richard Dawkins might call it. As Scott notes below, the nest is built separately—by the female.

Here’s another couple of photos that might interest your readers. Picture one. The bower of the Golden Bowerbird [Prionodura newtoniana].  Photographed in the tropical rainforest in the Atherton Tablelands southwest of Cairns, Queensland Australia, this bower is a bachelor’s pad where he swoons females. The male builds this extravagant stick structure, decorating it with lichens and flowers. Females come and inspect the bower and give it (or not) her seal of approval. He always displays for her at the bower, and makes the most unusual metallic calls. If she likes it enough, the good old boy gets lucky. A brief cloacal kiss at the bower and off she goes. The male of course, keeps tidying up his bower, putting more extravagant displays up to an almost Mar-a-Lago structure. They last for years.  The female, of course, is left to do the heavy lifting of building the proper nest and raising the chicks.

Picture number two entitled.” Are you free for dinner tonight?”  Here the male Golden Bowerbird brings an inflorescence  of the Melicope tree to decorate his bower.  This “flower” is highly valued by Golden Bowerbirds, and this fellow hopes these red roses will win the day—or rather the night—for him.

Kangaroo rescue

May 26, 2025 • 12:30 pm

For our final video of the day, we have a two-minute clip of a very gutsy man rescuing a big male kangaroo who was caught in a metal cable. All’s well that ends well.

Kangaroos are reputed to be dangerous, for they can kick you hard. But I found only two reported human deaths due to kangaroos. The animal most likely to kill you in Australia, according to Wikipedia’s “animal attacks in Australia” article, is snakes, with between 3 and 10 deaths per year.

Green sea turtle noms jellyfish

May 15, 2025 • 1:38 pm

It doesn’t get stung for some reason! However, one site says this:

The green sea turtle is the largest hard-shelled sea turtle. They are unique among sea turtles in that they are herbivores, eating mostly seagrasses and algae.

I guess it wanted a change.

The species, Chelonia mydas, is endangered and has undergone a steep decline in population size.  It is protected everywhere.

Readers’ wildlife photos and video

April 30, 2025 • 8:15 am

I am running out of photos, so please send in any good ones you have. Thanks!

Today’s batch is from reader Ken Phelps, whose IDs are indented. There are several photos and then a salacious video of otters at the bottom. Click the photos to enlarge them.

The first shot is a Vanilla Leaf plant (Achlys triphylla) grimly hanging on to life last October.

The deer photos were taken in July some years ago. It was lounging on the unmanicured mossy rock on which our bedroom is perched. It was watchful but unperturbed. The shot labeled Deer Pose was taken through the bedroom French door. A slight reflection gave it a slightly gauzy boudoir look.

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A close look at the petals of a very yellow flower whose identity I do not recall.

Four mushrooms crowded together:

Ice on a gravelly puddle. Good for a bit of pareidolia:

 

More in the pareidolia vein. Knobbly ice forming on a rocky outcrop, converted to a B&W negative image. A lot of faces, many of them canine, hidden in there:

 

Not wildlife, but our older dog Dixie trying to look sorry about making, and then rooting about in, a mudhole in the garden

And listen to the noise of these mating otters! (Sound up!)

Here is a link to a video I took of a pair of river otters engaging in what I assume is conjugal bliss. Filmed while we were moored at the wharf at Newcastle Island, Nanaimo, British Columbia.