Wait A Minute; Those Aren't Mallards

      One day toward the end of April of 1994, for some forgotten reason I got up at 5:30 and then happened to look out the window toward my newly filled pond.  I noticed “the Mallards” that I had seen the previous week, out swimming on the pond.  I grabbed my binoculars to watch the, and to my surprise, discovered that they weren’t the mallards after all.  I wasn’t sure what they were.  I dug out one of my bird books, and discovered that they were Wood Ducks. 

            Wow, I had a pair of beautifully adorned Wood Ducks swimming around on my pond.  I had never dreamed anything that exotic would be out there.

      The Wood Ducks seemed to be using the pond as one of their stopping off places, and they were very flighty, and flew off anytime they saw someone out in the yard.  I was very excited about them being on my pond, and hoped they would adopt it as their summer home.

    In the following weeks we spotted the pair of Wood Ducks periodically on the pond, as well as a pair of Canada Geese and Mallards.  Then one day a third Wood Duck (another male) appeared.  (The photo above shows two male Wood Ducks. 

          I had spread some goat manure on the dam to help the grass seed to grow, and that manure had a lot of oats in it that my goats had wasted.  It didn’t take long for the ducks to discover those oats in the manure I had spread and they began to make numerous trips up to the top of the dam to feast on the oats.

    One evening I was watching the Wood Ducks from the house.  They walked up on the dam to feed, then after a while, waddled back down to the water to swim.  Then I noticed that the female began to stretch out flat on the surface of the pond quite unnaturally, and looked like a beaver swimming.  I was sure something was wrong with her, and I began feeling guilty that maybe she had eaten some of the goat droppings that were in the manure I spread.  I feared I had poisoned the duck by having those goat droppings in the manure.

    Then something happened that suddenly relieved those fears and guilt that were building up inside me;  the male wood duck mounted the female for mating.  I assumed that the female’s lowering into that position, signaled to the male that she was ready to mate.  I felt like a biologist who had made some amazing discovery, but it was just a discovery for me.  I did feel really good about the wood ducks feeling so secure in my pond, that they felt safe to mate. 

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca