Category: Botany Pond

PCC(E)’s wildlife photos and videos: Duck update

August 28, 2026 • 8:30 am

The “ducklings”—if you can call them that now that they’re fully feathered and miniature adults—are almost six weeks old: they hatched on July 25 and came to the pond the next day. All is well with them: they all seem healthy and lively, and they eat heartily, though Miss Duck allows the babies to eat before she does. It’s hard to get food to her as her brood tends to scarf it up.

The babies are already starting to flap their wings vigorously, as you can see in the videos below, and I expect that in about 2-3 weeks they’ll be trying to fly, and levitating a bit. I suspect that the “zooming” behavior you see below is both fun but also practice for taking off.

But first some photos. First, Miss Duck, the ever-attentive mom who is still monitoring the babies closely. She’a also starting to molt, and during this period she will be able to flap and levitate a bit, but when she molts her flight feathers she’ll be pretty much grounded for a couple of weeks.

First, Miss Duck on the water. I love this photo, what with the reflection and all. (I posted it the other day.)

On the edge of the pond, watching her brood. Notice that her foot is on the side and not underneath her:

And a glamour head shot. If she returns next year I’ll be able to recognize her by this distinctive beak pattern.

Here’s the brood crossing the sidewalk in the morning so I can feed them in the channel. As soon as they plop in the water (I won’t feed them on land), they immediately turn and face me, waiting for their duck pellets. They know the drill!

Make way for ducklings!  You can see that Mom is still larger:

Sleeping on the water six days ago (iPhone photo). Mom is floating:

Often Miss Duck and the brood will get the “zoomies” after a meal. Usually initiated by Miss Duck taking off and flying a short distance in the pond, the ducklings go wild, zooming across the pond at high speed chasing Mom, as well as dunking themselves and swimming underwater. I’m convinced that, with Mom’s prompting, this behavior prepares them for flight. Notice how they often flap their wings during the exercise.

I’ll show two bouts. This first one took place after third breakfast a week ago (they get fed three times a day):

And here’s a vigorous case of the soomies yesterday:

The babies also “dabble” after meals. In the wild, they get most of their food by going butt-side up and thrusting their beak into the pond bottom, taking in some mud and then squeezing out the dirt but keeping the edible stuff (worms, other inverts, etc.). As I’ve shown before, ducks have “teeth”: serrations on their bill that allow them to get rid of the inedible stuff and keeping the food. In this way they’re like baleen whales.

Since the pond bottom is gravel and not dirt (a huge mistake in the pond design), the dabbling takes place in the dirt in the few pots of plants that they’ve put in the pond, which have dirt in them. Unfortunately, the plants cannot spread because the pond bed is gravel. It’s beyond my ken why they designed the pond this way, for it will prevent the luxurious growth of aquatic grasses and water lilies we were promised when the pond was reopened.

Here’s one duckling dabbling in an empty plant pot in mid-August.  At this time they still had their duckling fuzz, but you can see the feathers coming in. Now they are fully feathered and fuzzless, but their flight feathers have a way to go.

And here’s a napping duckling with almost all the feathers grown in.  There’s still a patch of fuzz on the butt and neck.

Ducklings napping on the edge of the pond. They always do this in the full group of four, and Miss Duck is among them, usually at one end of the line so she can watch them all. The “white” covering in the eye is their nictitating membrane.

The babies are starting to develop the speculum: the patch of blue  secondary wing feathers that you can see on Miss Duck’s wing above. It is one of the landmarks of attaining adulthood.  I’ve circled the nascent speculum in the first photo. Curiously, we’re not sure what this speculum is for. It’s present in both sexes, but could be the result of mutual sexual selection or selection for species recognition.

The nascent speculum is clear here:

The brood heading to one of the three Sacred Rocks to rest after a meal. There’s lot of dunking and preening before they settle down. Notice that Miss Duck gets up on the rock to let the babies know where to go.

DANGER!  There is a nest of Cooper’s Hawks (Astur cooperii) in the quad, and the young hawks often inspect the pond. Miss Duck sees them before we do, and she warns the babies with a specific quack. They immediately become motionless. While I’ve seen the hawks fly low over the pond, they’ve never tried to take a duckling, thank Ceiling Cat.

These photos were taken three days ago by my friend Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist on Team Duck. The tree is adjacent to the Pond, but I let Peggy take a few pictures before I chased the hawk away.

The definitive ID comes from Bruce Lyon, who looked at the photos and said, “Yes I think it’s a Cooper’s. I had to double check that it was not a broad-winged hawk. Looks like it is molting its tail so it is shorter than typical and a long tail would indicate Coopers’.”

And we musn’t forget the turtles. We now have six of them. We originally had five but one died (I was told, without proof , that its shell was cracked when students were playing Frisbee with it). But then a student found a large red-eared slider on the Midway, far from the pond, and carried it over and let it jump in. That made five again. Then a smaller red-eared slider appeared, probably another willful introduction.

They are all well and many people come to watch them. A group of women who work in the Regenstein Library regularly visit, and they’ve named all the turtles after hamburger-ish sliders, like “Buffalo Chicken Wing” and “Beef”. Unlike me, they can recognize every turtle.

A few photos of our terrapins. Here are four sunning on the rocks and doing Turtle Yoga, stretching their limbs to catch the sun:

You can see why they call them red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans):

Finally, two videos showing the turtles. This first one also shows some of the seven species of fish we have in the pond. All are naturally-occurring (as are sliders and ducks), but there are four pesky goldfish that someone is going to remove and put in an aquarium.

This turtle is going after some leftover duck food, but they do get fed a healthy diet of turtle food (not by me):

This video shows how they swim around. They’re quite fast in the water when they’re in a hurry, in contrast to their slow ambling on land:

August 1 ducks

August 2, 2026 • 8:15 am

“How is the Duck Family doing?”, you ask.  They’re peachy—couldn’t be better. Today is the two-week anniversary of when they came to Botany Pond, and Miss Duck and her Brood of Four are healthy, happy (as far as I can tell), vigorous, and certainly well fed.  You’ll see below how the babies have grown: they now have pointy tails, are at least twice as large as when they came to the Pond, and soon will enter their awkward teenage phase as their feathers start to come in.

All the ducks know me and come to me when they see me at the pond; I don’t even have to whistle for them. I am their Human Food-Vending Machine.

For two of the last three mornings, they were waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs leading from my building to the Pond, and when they saw me they came waddling and strutting up. As you can see below, the babies were peeping and Miss Duck was making soft quacks because she wasn’t quite sure of my intentions. I herded them to the water in the channel, as I always feed them in the water—it makes less mess if there is uneaten food. (The fish and turtles get it quickly in the water.)

Miss Duck, unlike other hens I’ve tended, is frightened of the large turtles, quacks when they approach (the babies don’t care), and swims away from them. She feints at them with her bill, and sometimes at the fish as well. But I manage to get enough food in them all to keep them fat and growing. (They get fed three or four times per day).

So here’s what greeted me yesterday morning when I came to the Pond about 6:30 a.m. You can hear me speaking to them, as a duck expert told me that they will also recognize my voice. Although my vocal timbre changes, I don’t speak to them like one who speaks to a child, for I think animals should be addressed as adults.

Sound up on all videos.

After breakfast in the channel, the family invariably swims back to the main Pond, deciding to settle on one of the three or four rocky spaces where they can dry off, rest, and digest. Here they first try the “Sacred Rock” in the NW part of the pond, and then settle on the big flat rock between the benches.

Look how they’ve grown!

Yesterday morning there were fairly heavy rains, but the ducks were all dry when they came for food after the rain stopped. I have no idea where they go to stay dry, as when it rains heavily you simply can’t look over the Pond in person without getting drenched. Here they are after the rain in a screenshot from thePondCam. Can you find Miss Duck and her ducklings?

Finally, a first yesterday: a rabbit appeared at the Pond. Though Hyde Park is full of Eastern Cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus), I have never seen one at Botany Pond. If it hangs around I may try to feed it, though I’m wary of that Cooper’s Hawk who sometimes comes by.  The arrow points to the bunny.

I’ll do my best to provide updates, but I just changed Big Computers and that always causes problems and stress, in this case with uploading pictures and videos. Stay tuned: you will not miss the ducklings growing up!

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:

The duck situation at Botany Pond. . .

June 4, 2026 • 9:30 am

. . . is dire. It is in fact so dire that although I have movies and photos of Vashti and of the last hen and her brood of nine, I am not mentally prepared to put them up, as they evoke bad memories and deep sadness. (As you may recall, both broods left the pond, almost certainly because they were harassed by drakes.) Vashti came back and re-nested in her old nest (!); she’s now sitting on a brood of seven eggs. The second hen, who was never named, has also returned but hasn’t (yet) nested, but is accompanied by an aggressive drake.

I have been keeping a careful eye on what is going on in the pond, and I’m quite worried about Vashti, whose brood is set to hatch within two weeks. Once a day I call her down to the pond for a feeding and a bath. She stays for about 15 minutes, gobbling up a big meal, preening for a while, and then quickly flying back to her nest to incubate the eggs. But over the past week or so, the damn drakes have been chasing her when they see her, driving her out of the pond, quacking and hiding nearby. It is only with considerable effort that I can get her away from the drakes so she can eat and go back to her nest. Note that the drakes aren’t trying to attack her; they want to mate with her. And she doesn’t want to mate!

What this means is that when she finally comes down with ducklings, she and her brood will be mercilessly harassed, just like the last hen and her brood. And that means that in all likelihood they will flee the pond, which means certain death for the ducklings.

I thus have a hard choice: let them come to the pond and take their chances, or arrange for the brood (and mother, if all possible) to be captured and either taken to a distant body of water or to a wildlife rehab facility.  The first alternative is unpalatable, as it involves the death of the entire brood, but I think it’s likely if I don’t intervene. Lately I have been moving towards to the second alternative:  letting Facilities and the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors take over and recover everyone if they can. Getting the ducklings is relatively easy, though they’ll be in the water very quickly after they jump. But getting Mom is a job for pros, as she can fly away.

My priority is to save lives, not entertain the University community with the sight of ducklings—ducklings who won’t last on the Pond more than a day or two.

It’s always been a great joy for me to help rear the babies up to fledging, but compared to the loss of lives, that is a selfish attitude. I think I will go by the words of Maimonides, “If you save one life, it is as if you saved the world entire.”  To me that means that I could save an entire life for each duckling rescued. It’s a hard decision and a sad one, but if the goal is to save lives, the strategy is clear.

The good news is that all five turtles put in the pond last fall survived the winter. Here they are sunning on a rock yesterday. There are four red-eared sliders and one yellow-bellied slider—two subspecies of a single species.

 

Turtle yoga at Botany Pond

May 25, 2026 • 11:44 am

As you may know from following the Botany Pond reports here, Vashti had one brood that vanished from the pond two days after the babies jumped into the water with Mom. I was out of town and nobody has any idea where it went.

About a week ago, another (unnamed) hen jumped down to the ground with nine of her ducklings (I had rescued one the previous afternoon and had it conveyed to a wildlife sanctuary).  Getting that hen to the pond with her babies was tough: she was followed by only three or four, and she tried to go to the Pond the wrong way around the building, which would require that everyone climb the stairs. The ducklings couldn’t manage stairs that big, so I herded the four (or five) around the south end of the building, around the bend, and through the vegetation into the pond.  That wasn’t easy given the intervening bushes. Then I went back to see what was left below the nest. There were five or six ducklings wandering around disco0nsolate, peeping plaintively for mom, and some of them had gotten themselves jammed in the window well. Fortunately, I had my trusty net and captured all of them without undue stress and no apparent injury (I mostly used my hands).

I took the babies around to the pond, placed them two by two on a rock, and their peeping, combined with Mom’s quacking, quickly reunited the brood, winding up with one proud and nine ducklings. It was hard, but I was heartened when the two major drakes in the pond (Armon and his “buddy”, whom he doesn’t like) left the brood alone. But then another drake flew in and the combination of three of them was too much for the mother: the hen walked out of the pond with her babies and into the vegetation on the other side of the south fence.

They did not reappear and I can presume only that they are gone, with the babies probably dead.  This was heartbreaking and I still haven’t recovered. I kick myself because I could have sent every baby to rehab, which would have required breaking up the family.  I made a guess, and it turned out to be the wrong decision–but only in retrospect.

But now I am pretty sure that Vashti and her first brood were also driven out of the pond by those odious drakes. I say “first brood” because Vashti has re-nested, laid seven eggs, and her second brood is going to hatch in mid-June.  This time, if there are too many drakes around, I think the best thing would be to capture the babies and have them taken to rehab.  That, of course, will break up her second family, and I can’t believe that derailing her maternal efforts twice won’t break her heart, in a ducky kind of way. It’s also sad because one of my great joys, and that of the pond’s visitors, is to see a brood of tiny fluffballs turn into full-size mallards, ready to fly away come late summer or fall.

The upshot is that I have photos of the latest brood but am not yet ready to put them up and relive the misery. I will post them as soon as I recover.

In the meantime, it’s sunny and warm, and the five turtles in the pond are busy sunning themselves on the rock.  Here’s a photo from the other day of three of them performing what we call “turtle yoga”: stretching out their limbs and necks to get as much sun as they can.  I explain to some of the Pond’s visitors that they are trying to get their body temperature up after immersion in cold water.

I’m not going to reread this because going over what happened upsets me, but here is Turtle Yoga. Click the photo to enlarge it: This photo was taken with my iPhone, so the quality is worse than usual. The photos that are coming will be better.

Our brood of ducks has vanished

April 23, 2026 • 8:15 am

It breaks my heart to have to report this, but somehow Vashti and her brood of seven ducklings vanished from Botany Pond sometime after Tuesday morning, and have not been seen since.

I have no idea what happened. They were last seen at the pond during Tuesday’s morning rain showers, with the brood warmly tucked under Vashti’s belly.  Now: no ducks—not a trace. The only one left is Armon, who swims disconsolately around the pond and refuses food. He has lost his family.

It was probably not predators: no bodies were found. I’ve ascertained that no workpeople were in the pond during the week.  Either someone scared them away or they walked away, something that hasn’t happened before.

Whatever is the case, the ducklings will probably perish, as the nearest body of water is too far away for little ones to walk.

The members of Team Duck and I are devastates. The seven ducklings were healthy, Vashti was being a great mother, and even Armon stepped up to protect the brood. The invading undocumented drakes left the brood alone. Everything promised a great duck season, and I was looking forward to helping the little ones grow up into adult mallards.

That, it seems, is not to be. This portends to be The Year Without Ducklings.

Four—count them, four—turtles

April 9, 2026 • 12:30 pm

It was a rough morning on Botany Pond. Two undocumented drakes invaded this morning, and I must have spent 45 minutes chasing them around with my squirt gun. They would leave (along with Armon, who always returns), but then come back again. When they are around they will harass Vashti, even driving her off the nest, and that’s not good.

Finally Armon and Vashti were left alone, but I don’t want the undocumented ducks coming back.  Also, when chasing the errant drakes away, I accidentally spooked the wood duck pair, who have taken off.  I was sad because I love them so much, and I hope they return. (They’re clearly not yet nesting.) Armon goes after invaders, but not with great vigor: he’s a bit of a wuss.

But now all is quiet, and we had an epochal event a few minutes ago: four of the five red-eared slider turtles we put into the pond last fall (retrieved before Botany Pond was renovated) showed up, and all were competing for space and sun on a small rock.  There are other rocks they could use, but they like the one below.  I suspect the fifth turtle wandered away from the Pond at some point. This is the first time I’ve been able to see more than three turtles.

I’m exhausted: duck tending is no picnic!