Category: birds

Duck update: videos

August 8, 2026 • 9:15 am

Today we have mostly videos of the ducks (I’m waiting for my photos to transfer to a new computer, and changing computers is always a horror). Photos will be coming. But in many ways the videos (about 1 minute each) give you a better idea of what the ducklings are like.

In short, the four ducklings are peachy, and growing very fast! You’ll see from the videos and two photos below that they have just started growing feathers on their tails, on their little stubby wings, and on their sides. In about ten days they’ll be in their awkward, scruffy teenage stage: half duckling, half adult. But I love them all.  They are fat, happy (I think), and lively, and Miss Duck is taking great care of them. But look for yourself:

The caption of this video tells the tail; it’s the end of their mealtime when they get freeze-dried mealworms as dessert. That is their favorite nosh. Miss Duck looks on, supervising but also eating on her own. When ducklings are around, she always ensures that they eat before she does. She’s a great mom.

After a meal the family often repairs to what I call the Sacred Rocks, a place where they can nap and preen in the shade. Miss Duck is always watching over the brood, usually from above:

Sometimes they repair to another rock: a flat one at the north end of Botany Pond. This is quite close to a pair of benches where people sit to watch them (as well as the turtles, who occupy the rocks when the ducks are absent).

The caption:

Look at this fat little duckling, crop distended with food! (I feed them well.) His/her little black foot is sticking out, like duckling yoga. In the past two or three days, their feet have changed color from black to the adult orange. Botany Pond, the University of Chicago, August 6, 2026

Here’s the caption I gave this video. Be sure to listen for Miss Duck’s soft quacks meaning “Go away, turtle.”

Miss Duck does not like turtles, though they are harmless to her and her brood. My guess is that she has an instinct to avoid them, as in the wild some turtles, like snappers, can hurt or kill ducklings. You can hear her quack from time to time as a response to the red-eared slider sharing this rock. (The brood pays turtles no mind.) Botany Pond, The University of Chicago, August 6, 2026.

The caption:

The ducklings love to dabble (root around) in the dirt, especially in the plant pots whose contents have died. (The ducks do not eat the plants.) Here you can see their feathers developing, mostly on their stubby little wings, as patches of brown. Their tails are getting feathers, too, and resemble little paintbrushes. Botany Pond, the University of Chicago, August 7, 2026.

Here’s one shot showing the incipient feathers. It’s so exciting: they’re not even three weeks old. I think they’re past the vulnerable stage now, which makes me happy. Can you see the tiny brown feathers on their wings and on their sides? Notice also the orange feet.

Finally, I noticed that when I was feeding the brood from the bridge, a sparrow was picking up little duck food pellets and broken mealworms, feeding them to her importuning baby. Life is burgeoning at the pond.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 7, 2026 • 8:30 am

Today’s photos come from Miriam Meyerhoff, who responded to my call for readers to send it photo. (That call, by the way, still exists!). Miram’s captions are indented and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

In June we spent a week in Orkney (Mainland and Westray) to see neolithic sites and some wildlife. I’m not good at photographing birds (and I just have an iPhone) so I have photos of puffins, some fulmars and lots of plants.

On the Mainland of Orkney, we visited Skara Brae and various stone circles. Skara Brae was first inhabited about 3100 BCE. The homes had built-in furniture (kind of like Frank Lloyd Wright did with his houses) with a dresser of shelves opposite the door and beds built into the walls on the right and left walls:

On Westray, we walked for about an hour with a local guide, Megan of Wild Orkney Walks. Megan was extremely knowledgeable about plants and wildlife and is deeply concerned about the impact of over-fishing on the Orkney sea birds.

It turns out puffins (Fratercula sp.) are not at all scared of people and will let you come very close:

They nested alongside fulmars on the cliffs. Fulmars  (Fulmaris sp.) are not gulls, they are in the same family as albatrosses and petrels. Apparently, fulmars can defend themselves by spewing up a foul smelling oily mess and spitting it at you. The first syllable ful- is cognate with the word foul on account of this habit:

The clifftops we walked along had many plants that were new to me. Sea thrift (Armeria maritima, aka sea pinks) and red campion and sea campion  as well as meadowsweet [flowers in order]:

There was also an impressive selection of different thistles. I think this was a cruel thistle (Cersium ferox):

Along the roadside there were masses of marsh orchids, hogweed, and yellow flags were still in bloom (flowers in order):

Wild roses (Rosa rugosa) were also in bloom. I didn’t know you can eat the petals. They taste a bit like glycerin to me:

Back on the mainland, the oddest plant I saw was Cottonweed. The seed heads do produce something very like cotton wool:

But the most beautiful (to me) was the smallest flower on a clifftop near Yesnaby, sea milkwort. I gather it is quite common in the northern hemisphere, but I didn’t grow up here. I loved how simultaneously tough and dainty it manages be.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 5, 2026 • 8:15 am

We have only a few batches left, and I am baffled about why few submissions are coming in. Please, if you have photos and appreciate this site, send me some good ones. Thanks!

Today’s photos come from Marcel van Oijen in the Netherlands. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

A Dutch Garden in Summertime

Marcel van Oijen

This summer we spent two weeks in the Netherlands, looking after the house of Nellie and Roel who count as both family and close friends. The following nine pictures were taken in their garden in the small town of Woudenberg, in the central Dutch province of Utrecht. Even though the Netherlands are just 700 km away from us (we live in Scotland on the opposite side of the North Sea), temperatures were about ten degrees higher there which made for much more varied wildlife.

This is a Willow Emerald damselfly (Chalcolestes viridis), recognisable from its brownish eyes. We never see damselflies or dragonflies in our garden here, so this was a huge and pleasant surprise:

Small White butterfly (Pieris rapae). Very common on both sides of the pond:

Vagrant Darter dragonfly (Sympetrum vulgatum). The species can be identified from its yellow-black legs, and its overall yellow colour tells us it’s a female;

Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta). A very common butterfly also here in Scotland:

Another Pieris butterfly, a Green-veined White (Pieris napi). I find the various Whites often difficult to photograph because they are so restless, but here they took their time feeding, maybe because the heat was too much even for them, or the flowers contained more nectar than usual?:

This European Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus) was a joy to follow during our days in the garden, when it was making or repairing its web, or scurrying toward the foliage whenever I got too close. Here it is wrapping up some prey (a hoverfly perhaps) for dinner later.

The sky was not really this featureless white, but I overexposed this picture of a Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) by two stops to make the picture look somewhat like a Chinese print:

And here is its larger cousin, a Great Tit (Parus major), with tiny prey:

We finish with one of the most common hoverflies in Europe, a Marmalade Hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus). This photo was taken while sitting at the breakfast table in the garden, where they would be hovering near the same flowers every morning, so I could focus the camera first and then simply wait for one of them to appear in the right spot:

The latest from Botany Pond

July 30, 2026 • 8:15 am

All is well on Botany Pond. The four ducklings abide, and are growing, healthy, and eating well. Miss Duck is still a great mother, though every few days, when the ducklings are sleeping on a rock, she’ll fly away for 45 minutes or so. Where does she go? Is she just exercising the need for airspeed? I often wait anxiously by the Pond for her return, and feed her as a reward for returning.

In a first of all mother hens I’ve tended, Miss Duck is afraid or wary of turtles, quacking softly when one approaches and feinting towards them with her bill. They do not notice her, and she apparently hasn’t learned that they’re harmless.

Here are a few snaps.

First, a predator nearby! I sent the out-of-focus photo of this raptor to two friends, both of whom identified it as a young Cooper’s Hawk (Astur cooperii). It was only about twenty feet from the brood lounging on the rock. Miss Duck quacked at it, but she made no attempt to flee.  One friend, an ornithologist, said this:

That hawk is a curious case because I think it has a mix of two year old (gray) and yearling (brown) feathers plus I am guessing it it partially leucistic (all the white bits). Based on shape I suspect Cooper’s hawks and they are serious bird killers so a duckling is a distinct possibility for its dinner. For a Cooer’s hawk the eye is also very pale and I wonder if that is also part of being leucistic?

Of course I chased it away; it’s out of focus because I was nervous when I photographed it.  I haven’t seen it in the past three days, but I think there’s a nest of these guys (or perhaps of red-tailed hawks) supposedly in the Quad nearby. The “serious bird killers” part disturbs me. Fingers crossed. Yes, hawks gotta eat, but not my ducklings! In all the years I’ve tended ducks, we haven’t lost any to predators, though one disappeared from a brood a few years ago.

The hawk looks intent, but of course raptors always look intent.

A few more photos of the brood resting. Look at the leg sticking out from the duckling on the right!

They are starting to look more like adult ducks, though there’s a long way to go (they won’t be flying until mid-September at the earliest).  Another leg is sticking out in the photo below.  They also have pointy tails and their heads are getting smaller relative to their bodies.  Note that they’re well fed!

The stripe through the eye on both adults and ducklings intrigues me, and I can understand it only as a way to camouflage the eye—an indicator of the head that predators may use.  I asked Grok, which emitted this answer:

  • The eye is often a conspicuous, shiny target. A strong horizontal dark stripe through it blurs or conceals its exact location from a distance, making it harder for aerial or ground predators to lock onto the head.
  • Combined with the mottled brown body plumage, the stripe acts as disruptive coloration: it interrupts the smooth outline of the head so the bird blends better into reeds, grasses, mud, or water edges.
  • This is especially critical for nesting females (who sit exposed for weeks) and for ducklings, which are highly vulnerable right after hatching. Sources specifically note that the ducklings’ eye stripes provide excellent camouflage in the wild.

Mom et brood resting on the edge of the pond in a shady area (it was hot two days ago).  Note that Miss Duck also has the eye stripe:

Finally, the pond is now full of dragonflies, and although Miss Duck tries to catch them, they are too fast for her. I’ve seen a duck catch a dragonfly only once. I don’t know the species of this one, but perhaps Mark Sturtevant will oblige:

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 29, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today’s bird photos (and one of a reptile) come from reader Jan Malek, and were taken in New Jersey. Jan’s captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

At the beginning of this June, I visited the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge (that’s quite a mouthful; it would be easier to just say “Brigantine.” Bombastic names are a symptom of societal decline) in southern NJ.

Marsh wrens (Cistothorus palustris) were nesting in the reed thicket. The male builds 3 to 12 nests and the female chooses one; the others help determine the territory or just serve as a testament to the male’s fitness. Another hypothesis is that they work as decoys to prevent predation. Thanks to flexible hip joints, unlike other birds, wrens can strike an impossible pose while clinging to cattail reeds:

A black skimmer (Rynchops niger) made its characteristic low-level fishing sweeps over the channel just after sunrise—a quite late work shift for these crepuscular birds. I was always puzzled by how these birds manage to fly with a good part of their lower mandible submerged in water. It would appear that such drag would severely disrupt or even stall a bird. Any human-made aircraft, when attempting a water landing from a gliding flight, is at severe risk of a violent stall when any part comes into contact with the water. Besides our black skimmer, there are only two other closely related species in the Rynchops genus, attesting to how rare this useful adaptation is:

Looking closer, it turns out the skimmer’s mandible is not like any other bird’s. Its edges are almost fused together to create a knife-edge structure, so when the bird lowers its lower mandible (which is longer than the upper maxilla) into the water, the hydrodynamic drag forces are three orders of magnitude smaller than the lift force the bird creates. The bird maximizes its lift by almost touching the water, using the ground effect, which, to my limited knowledge of physics, compresses a cushion of air and drastically reduces drag beneath the wings, giving the bird some energy recovery from what was spent to remain aloft. The bill is shaped in such a way that dragging it in the water does not create a spray that would hit the bird and disrupt its flight; rather, the water is pushed aside, like waves from a highly efficient racing speedboat:

But what happens when the skimmer catches prey, which can be a sizable fish? It would seem such an obstacle would ruin all the streamlined beak adaptations and stall the bird. But no: the moment the skimmer senses prey, its beak snaps shut and the bird automatically relaxes its neck muscles, all in milliseconds, and the head smoothly pivots down, absorbing the sudden drag increase:

This time the skimmer has missed—no prey:

These adaptations are so unique that I’d risk predicting that biomechanics and closely imitating living organisms’ adaptations in man-made objects will be the next wave of inventions after the AI revolution. For better and worse, imagine microscopic synthetic amoebas in the bloodstream targeting and destroying cancer cells, or robotic dragonflies carrying ultra-small-caliber munitions that seek humans on the battlefield:

By my count, about 6 pairs of ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) nest close to the observation road, their density determined by artificial nesting sites. Each site has a main nest platform and a separate perch where one of the birds can get a rest from chick-rearing duties:

Terns (probably Forster’s terns, Sterna forsteri) made their fishing runs about two hours after sunrise. Here, “fishing” is understood broadly, as this bird caught a marine worm. It was probably a polychaete worm (class Polychaeta), which swarm to the surface during their breeding season. I wonder how the tern managed to swallow this catch:

Fish caught in the shallows attracted the attention of a group of snowy egrets (Egretta thula):

Elsewhere, a mixed congregation of herons loitered in the water. Great egrets (Ardea alba), great blue herons (Ardea herodias), and snowies should be tending their chicks in a heronry at this time, so perhaps these were the societal rejects, unable to find a nest:

A shorebird stopped in the marsh, a bit late in its travel toward the Arctic. Based on the bill shape, I’m 55% certain it is a Greater yellowlegs (Tringa melanoleuca):

With the sun higher in the sky, males of the common yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas) started singing. I don’t get why they didn’t call it a “Black-masked warbler”:

To conclude this small series, here is something for the herpers: a Northern diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin terrapin).was crossing the road and curled up in a defensive posture before my car It took a while for the turtle to relax and go on its way: