Category: readers’ videos

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:

Readers’ wildlife video

July 24, 2026 • 8:15 am

We have another short video from Tara Tanaka in Florida, whose property is a wetlands and also a wildlife sanctuary. Tara’s notes are indented below:

There is a large church property directly across the truck route from our wildlife sanctuary, and a developer is about to meet with the county to discuss building a 108-single family subdivision on part of the property. According to the neighbor who is working to inform those affected by the proposed development: “Any development of that size would have devastating impacts on the character of our surrounding neighborhoods. The traffic impacts would further clog our roads, making traffic even worse than it already is. The light pollution coming from a site with 108 new homes would disrupt our tranquil way of life. Water runoff from the site will only worsen the flooding we see after rain events, especially to our neighbors in Riverwood Acres. And no one really knows of the impacts a new development would have on the wildlife we currently enjoy year-round.”

Some in the neighborhood are meeting with a reporter from a local TV station to make people aware of what is happening, and I was asked to provide video footage of some of the wildlife that nest, spend time in, and pass through the sanctuary, and I wanted to share it here as well.

How many species can you identify?

Duck report!!!

March 24, 2026 • 8:30 am

It’s time for a duck report.  Things have been erratic, duckwise, over the last couple of weeks, with the weather going nuts. On some days it’s been 70°F (21°C), on others it’s been below freezing, with snow or driving rain.  Through it all the ducks have been here, though in the last week or so Vashti makes only sporadic appearances.

Usually Vashti (the hen) has been absent in the mornings, leaving Armon (the drake) to sit disconsolately on the rocks, staring into space. It’s clear he wants to be with his boo, and only Ceiling Cat knows where she goes.  I suspect she’s building a nest somewhere and perhaps laying eggs (1 per day until they’re all laid).  But she can’t be incubating eggs yet, as she returns in the afternoon for hours, much to the delight of Armon, who begins eating again. This is a true duck romance.

It’s a bit early to incubate eggs, as the weather in April may be cold and rainy for ducklings. But I can’t control wild birds.

The breeding goes like this. First, Vashti will build a nest. They’ve almost always been on the window ledges of the building to the east of Botany Pond (Erman Hall), but I see no nest there, and if she were breeding there Armon would be in the water under the nest. Nor is she nesting under the tree where Esther nested last year. I have no idea where the nest is, and of course I can’t follow her.

As I said, hens lay one egg per day, but don’t start incubation until all the eggs are laid, whereupon she sits tight on the entire clutch, ensuring that all the embryos begin development at the same time and that they will hatch within a day of each other. The incubation period is 28 or 29 days, so when Vashti disappears, I begin the countdown. (I’ve already ordered a big stock of duckling food.)  During incubation she may come to the pond every day or so for a very short period to have a bath and a feed (if I’m lucky enough to see her). But she won’t leave the eggs for very long.

During incubation, wild mallards can lose up to 30% of their body weight as they neither eat nor drink.  Vashti, though, is pampered and can get fed during incubation. My intention is to feed her up so she has plenty of mass and energy to incubate the eggs, and, when she begins incubation, to watch the pond from my office to run down and feed her if she makes a short appearance. This will ensure that when the babies arrive, mom will be in good condition to tend them. That worked well for Esther last year, though she nested on the ground under a tree.

But I’m jumping the gun. Here are some photos and video I took over the last couple of weeks. Since the weather has been miserable, the sunny-day photos were all taken about the middle of March when it was warm.

Here’s a panorama of Botany Pond. Can you spot the pair? The answer is at the bottom.  Erman is the building to the left, and you can see the two pond-watching benches. There is a narrow channel of water behind where I stood to take this photo.

Armon and Vashti having luncheon:

Their main diet is Mazuri Waterfowl Chow, which provides a complete diet for ducks. New ducks usually must learn that what I throw them is what they should eat. (At first they are frightened.) But this pair learned quickly, which made me suspect that they are familiar with Botany Pond and the feeding ritual. Perhaps they were here in previous years, and one or both of them may be the offspring of Esther and Mordecai from last year. I whistle to them at feeding time, and they swim to me when they hear me or see me (they knew this from the outset). This again constitutes evidence that these ducks are familiar with Botany Pond.

Here’s a video of them having noms (Mazuri pellets):

After the pellets they get dessert: freeze-dried mealworms, their favorite. Mealworms are pricey but I don’t stint on them at this stage, since Vashti needs to be fattened up, and mealworms are a good source of protein.

Butt view of the pair swimming away:

Mallards on the rocks (a good name for a drink):

They are a handsome couple, no?

Lately they have actually been coming out of the water to greet me when I call. But I let them go back into the pond before I feed them, as they need to sip water during and between bouts of eating pellets and mealworms:

One day I watched Vashti foraging on the ground after lunch.  I have no idea what she’s finding to eat in all the dirt and mulch, but she was very busy and clearly finding noms. Worms, slugs, whatever:

Here’s a video of Vashti foraging on the ground. Armon is of course nearby (they are never separated by more than a couple of feet when they’re in the water). Armon peeks over the ledge to see that his hen is okay. Notice her full crop!

And, ladies and gentlemen, comrades, brothers and sisters, here is Vasthi in all her mallardly glory. She’s pretty plump, which is how I want her when she starts incubating her eggs:

And we can’t neglect the handsome Armon, all decked out in his breeding plumage:

I will of course keep you updated, though I wish I knew where the nest was!

Finally, here are the ducks in the pond panorama, circled:

Readers’ wildlife video

October 7, 2025 • 8:30 am

Today we have a 3-minute video taken by ecologist Adam Greer and showing fascinating and complex zooplankton.  The video is below, and I asked Adam to provide some additional information on this animal. Adam’s explanations are indented.

I am a zooplankton ecologist at University of Georgia. A major part of my research involves using camera systems to study the distribution and behavior of zooplankton. One zooplankton type we study is the appendicularians, which use mucous houses to feed on ocean microbes. They build and discard these houses several times per day, which can be a mechanism for moving carbon into the deep ocean. I recently put together a short video of this process, with the hope that it could help people see and appreciate that it is happening all over the world’s oceans. Appendicularians are quite fragile, and their houses are very difficult to see unless you use specialized optical techniques (the one we used in the video is called “shadowgraph imaging”).
I thought maybe this could be a variation on the wildlife photos, but obviously you may want to just show actual photos. Still, I think some of your readers might think it is interesting. I did my best to explain what is going on and use kind of informal language so everyone can understand.

The animal builds the (surprisingly intricate) house from a small mucous bubble then uses its tail to draw a current through the house. The water passes through a filter and then the particles get concentrated before being consumed (after going through the buccal tube). This diagram from Bochdansky and Deibel 1999 (below) is pretty helpful. The prey is very small relative to the size of the appendicularian – similar to the predator-prey size ratio of blue whales feeding on krill.

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0022098198001099-gr2.gif

The video does not go into these mechanics since you cannot really see that amount of detail, but I simply say in the video that they create a current through the house to capture their food. Then it shows the various stages of house building.

And Adam’s video (with music), which is indeed mesmerizing and clearly explained. Stuff like this is going on all the time, but we (or at least I) didn’t know about it.

Readers’ wildlife video

July 20, 2024 • 8:15 am

It must have been a few years since I posted a video by Tara Tanaka; I think she forgot about me! But I saw one of her video posts on FB and reconnected, asking permission to show her wildlife videos from her Florida property (there are several videos, so we have more to come).  This is one of them starring wood storks (Mycteria americana), and here’s her caption:

Last summer at this time the water level in our backyard cypress swamp was about 7′ lower than it is now, and dropping quickly. We had hundreds of Wood Stork nests, and many Great Egret and Anhinga nests as well as those of other wading bird species. We had up to 14 young Roseate Spoonbills visiting on different days in the late spring and early summer. It is rare for the adult storks to feed in our pond – my theory is that they are saving the fish and frogs for their soon to fledge youngsters, since once they begin flying they keep returning to the nest for some time – and having food right in their own backyard makes learning to fish and hunt a lot easier. Last year, however, the water was dropping so fast and there was so much concentrated prey, it’s possible that the adults knew that if they didn’t take advantage of it, the swamp would go dry and the fish would just be wasted. So they did what any intelligent stork would do – they gorged!! This period of time provided the most amazing scenes I’ve ever witnessed in 31 years of living here. It’s taken me a year to finally share it, but I hope you enjoy it!

Be sure to enlarge the video! Most of it save the end is speeded up deliberately, and there’s a great classical-music accompaniment which I, as an ignoramus, don’t recognize.  Thanks to Tara for granting permission to repost her videos (her Vimeo channel is here.)

Readers’ adventure travel

September 28, 2023 • 8:15 am

I’m not getting any new wildlife photos, and while I have a few in reserve, I implore readers to send me their good photos if they want to keep this site going. Here’s an unusual contribution:

In June my friend Andrew Berry, who teaches at Harvard, took a long trek (several guides are is required, along with pricey permits) to Dolpo and the fabled (and previously off-limits) kingdom of Mustang in northern Nepal. Andrew has converted his 3,000 photos, plus some iPhone videos, into a 53-minute account of the trek, which I’ve put below. It was a fantastic journey.

It’s also a trek I always wanted to make. Sadly, now that Mustang has opened up (though only a few tourists still go),  I’m too old to make this arduous trek, though when I hiked around Annapurna I used to stand at the border of the plateau at Jomsom and gaze northwest toward the (then) forbidden kingdom.

Note the dancing starting at 38:45: an authentic folk festival given that Andrew was the only foreigner in town. (It was the monsoon season.)

And if you want to read a brief, illustrated description of the trek, click on the screenshot below. The intro:

June ’23 was pretty open for me — time (yay!) for a visit to Nepal.  Problem: the monsoon arrives in Nepal around the middle of June.  Hiking through the rain isn’t what I had in mind, and it’s also rather self-defeating if you’re interested in seeing anything — the views are mainly, in the monsoon, banks of grey cloud.  But there are parts of Nepal, contra the long-ago Heineken ad, that the monsoon doesn’t reach, namely regions the North of the main range, in the rain shadow of the big peaks.  These transhimalayan regions are politically in Nepal, but are functionally — geographically, linguistically, and culturally — Tibetan.  Hence my trip to Dolpa/Dolpo and Mustang.  Remote country, and regions I’ve long wanted to visit [the first time I became aware of these areas was 41 years ago, during my first visit to Nepal.  I hiked back then to the boundaries of both Dolpa and Mustang, and stared, tantalized, into both.  They were however in those days off limits — foreigners prohibited (partly because of the proximity of the Chinese/TIbetan border).  That’s however changed: these days the Nepalese Govt both restricts access and makes money by charging top dollar for permits].  The virtue of the expense (permits) + low season + remoteness is that these areas are relatively unfrequented by foreigners like me.  In three weeks in the region this summer, I didn’t encounter a single non-Nepali.

I am of course wildly jealous.  If you want to see all of Andrew’s photos, go here. Here’s just one of many:

Readers’ wildlife photos and videos

July 18, 2022 • 8:00 am

Reader Rick Longworth observed a family of robins this year. His photos and videos are below, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them. Rick’s test is indented. Be sure to watch the video!

A pair of American robins (Turdus migratorius ) built a nest in our breezeway this year and they are finally fledging.  At first, I paid little attention as the couple constructed the nest and the 3 eggs were laid. Later the noise of the chicks begging for food caught my attention.  I noticed the nest was very tall and seemed layered, so I thought it might be a new nest built on top of an old one. I know they often have multiple broods in a season.

Father helped with feeding:

 

In the afternoon heat, sometimes above 100°F, the chicks kept their beaks open.

When the chicks were growing too big for the nest, I hoped to film the fledging event and I set the camera to run for a while as the largest nestling exercised its wings. Fortunately, it jumped while the camera was rolling. First, all three are fed a beak full of earthworms. Then the jump. Mama robin with her worn and tattered plumage makes an attempt to reward the jumper with more worms.

That mother is WORN OUT!

The poor mom looked like she’s been run through a laundry dryer she was so overworked.  The next morning the other two chicks fledged and followed mom into the hedge behind the house. The parents will find bugs for them for a few more days until they get the hang of it. Now that the young were off on their own, I hoped mom would recover quickly.

Finally, I dissected the nest to see why it seemed so tall.  It was 10” high and seemed to have a false start at the 6” level. There was a “bowl” shape, but not finished.

I originally thought, based on Rick’s surmise, that this was the third time the robin had nested, and her nests were build successively on top of each other. His dissection showed that we were wrong. He emailed me this:

I assumed wrong.  I have now dissected the nest and find that it was not a three story nest at all.  A little data goes a long way.

The nest is 10″ high and the lower part is simply foundation material.  There is no finished “bowl”, only the suggestion of one at the 6″ level.

It appears she started to finish it but then decided it wasn’t high enough and put more material on top.

Attached is a picture of the dissection showing the lower and top sections.

Earlier activity in the spring must have been nest building and brooding of the current clutch.