some good things

[kaberett]

We engaged in what is now our Brunch Date tradition, in that we visited the fancy bakery and then we bimbled around the aqueduct looking at baby birds while slowly consuming our spoils.

Baby birds the first were at coot nest #1; we spotted the mallard sitting merrily on top of it to start with, and then I went HOLD ON THAT'S A TINY FLUFFY DUCKLING. ... THREE DUCKLINGS. The coots (a) are not shy about chasing ducks off and (b) tend to move gradually down the not-exactly-a-river with successive clutches, so we are not too concerned about them.

There were also: another clutch of (rather larger) ducklings, with no supervising adult; some extremely teenage coots; some extremely baby coots going WHEEK WHEEK WHEEK at the tops of their tiny lungs; yet another coot nest containing one (1) adult, two (2) teenagers, and three (3) tiny fluffy cheeplets, the teenagers being actually in the nest and variously sitting on top of and preening the cheeplets. The Egyptian goslings meanwhile are very nearly all the way grown up, but continue to spend most of their time clustered together.

I am not entirely sure why I had decided baby season was probably over, but I think we can definitively say that It Is Not!

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have seen adult coots occasionally, but never babies. Adult ducks and ducklings are also occasional. There are always plenty of geese in local towns, and I saw some goslings this year, but only about half as many as usual. I think the whiplash weather undermined mating success.