Duck goose goose
May. 16th, 2016 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeJ. and I like to go on an afternoon walk at work -- our office buildings are adjacent, and they're near the river and the university duck pond. He likes to look at the river, and I like to look for birds, so we have two different walks we do. For mine, we go through the urban garden, along the millrace, and look for birds in the water, and then the millrace joins up with the duck pond, which is several city blocks long, with the university physical plant on one side and a six-lane road on the other, so we walk through the physical plant parking lot to see who's in the pond.
In the winter there are cormorants! And mergansers, and other exotic ducks! In the spring and summer, though, it's basically mallard ducks and Canada geese. Today I wanted to see babies! But all we could find were male ducks, on their own. One was sitting on the lawn on the other side of the duck pond, then a pair of geese waddled over to him and one poked him with his bill, so he gave up and went into the water and apparently commenced swimming back and forth, waiting for the geese to give up on his prime patch of lawn.
J. looked on Google and found that the geese raise their babies together, but ducklings are raised only by their mom, so we think that somewhere in the leaves and branches alongside the pond and millrace there were a lot of duck nests with expectant mama ducks. And maybe the babies. We'll keep checking back.
In the winter there are cormorants! And mergansers, and other exotic ducks! In the spring and summer, though, it's basically mallard ducks and Canada geese. Today I wanted to see babies! But all we could find were male ducks, on their own. One was sitting on the lawn on the other side of the duck pond, then a pair of geese waddled over to him and one poked him with his bill, so he gave up and went into the water and apparently commenced swimming back and forth, waiting for the geese to give up on his prime patch of lawn.
J. looked on Google and found that the geese raise their babies together, but ducklings are raised only by their mom, so we think that somewhere in the leaves and branches alongside the pond and millrace there were a lot of duck nests with expectant mama ducks. And maybe the babies. We'll keep checking back.