Friday, July 8, 2011

What the Mallard knew

I went back to sit by the pond, camera at the ready. My plan will be put on hold for a while.


4 comments:

Crash said...

Why does it look so brown and dry there? I thought your area would be lush green now.

bastinptc said...

Crash, they are on a rock peninsula next to the pond, and the grasses on it die off pretty early. We are entering our dry season, albeit later than usual, when pretty much everything but the trees dies off until September.

Should the ducklings survive the onslaught by crows, foxes, racoons and feral cats, they will have plenty of food, tadpoles and greenery, in the pond.

lightning36 said...

Believe it or not, there are some ducks that feed in my mother's front yard in suburban Chicago. They have been coming for a few years. I imagine they are sort of like local celebrities.

bastinptc said...

36, I'm not surprised. For a time I lived in a loft in a fairly dilapidated part of Chicago. Very industrial but without a lot of traffic. Just up the road were multiple railroad tracks that created a corridor about 150 feet wide that ran from downtown out to the suburbs. The edges of this are consisted of deep grass and weeds.

My son and I used to walk alongside those tracks quite often. It was not unusual fro us to scare up Ringneck Pheasant, and one time we flushed a Woodcock. Birders would know the significance of the latter.

One just has to keep one's eyes open to see the diversity.