Yes, it’s time for a wood duck update – it’s been a few weeks after all. The broods that visit still remain incredibly wary, requiring no small amount of sneakiness to photograph or video – their progress in getting used to us is not at all what we’d hoped, but we take solace in the fact that this also means they’re hypersensitive to any real threats that may arise.
Usually, once we spot them out at the edge of the pond, I sneak upstairs to the bathroom window, which has the best and most unobstructed view, but the mothers at least are savvy to that, and despite sitting well back in the room where, I would have thought, I was hidden by darkness within the house, they gather their broods immediately and head out onto the pond, virtually always taking a path that keeps a tree or foliage between them and me. So mostly what I get are glimpses.
All of the ducklings are getting big now, and this one is not only sporting a full set of flight feathers, there’s a hint of adult coloration on the head. No sign of them flying yet – mom still leads them swimming off across the pond when she feels unsafe, but we feel it’s only a matter of a week or two now.
Here, a mother leads her brood off to safety towards channel into The Bayou, and you can make out at least three ducklings hidden among the leaves of the yellow cow lilies (Nuphar lutea.) While we weren’t thrilled at how much these plants took over the pond in the spring, they ducks love them for the cover they provide, so there’s that at least; had they not been here, we likely would not have all the visits that we do. This is cropped of course, so I’ll show you what my actual view was:
And this is at 600mm from the upstairs window, roughly 50 meters distant – no view that I get falls below about 30, unless I sneak up on them at night. But occasionally, I get lucky enough to snag some video.
Very pleased to see the adult coloration coming in, especially those red eyes, and this is the first we’ve seen the ducklings scarfing down the corn that we distribute (some day I’ll get some video of the turtles coming up to eat it too.) And while the end credits hinted at this, you should know that the treefrog calls that you hear in there, the ‘breek‘ sounds, were not from the pond itself, but from an annoying pair that were sitting right outside the door of Walkabout Studios (the outside door, you smartasses,) and refused to shut up as I was recording the voiceover, long after shooting the video. This did result in several batches of tadpoles in various water sources, though, so I’ll feature them at some point later on.
[A small technical note on the recording: I did indeed use a noise gate on the file, which is a neat little script that takes out all sound that falls below a certain threshold, useful for removing the intakes of breath from unprofessional recording artists, and it took out the frog calls handily – except when I was talking. So you’re only hearing about half of what was originally captured…]
By the way, I have considered setting up a blind to allow me to be closer to the ducks, but there are too few good locations for this, and I could never get to it without being seen, so I’d have to get in place and wait for dog knows how long before something happens to come by. Not a thing to contemplate in this heat. Still, at the first appearance of the ducks last year, remaining as they were down on The Bayou, I was considering setting up a blind on the edge of that, several hundred meters away, so this is a vast improvement over what I’d suspected I might need to do.