Just a quick shot from this morning’s frenzy, snapped in the middle of a video clip. There are two things of minor interest within, the reasons I’m posting this. The first is, this was a little before sunrise, or perhaps right at astronomical sunrise (actually, the timestamp is pretty damn close to this mark,) but well before the sun would peek through the trees. However, the sky turned orange for just a minute or so as the sun broke through whatever cloud cover was on the horizon, and this color reflected from the water to produce a nice hue, which is why I tripped the shutter in the middle of the video. Very soon after this, that color faded and we went back to grey twilight skies and thus background.
The second is, I was able to do a count of the ducks in this frame, and have a dependable number of 46, with probably a few hiding behind others in there. During the video I panned left, and just now I paused and checked, and there are at least another 24 that fell outside of this frame. To be honest, this didn’t look like the busiest frenzy we’ve seen, so I suspect we’ve had more – one of these days I’ll work my way through some of the video clips and try for a supportable count.
This, by the way, was the first wave; after they spooked (as usual,) a lot of them could be seen heading towards the channel to The Bayou. But then a second wave descended on the yard, cleaning up most of the corn that we’d put down, and that was quite a bit. They had a little help from a small herd of five deer that showed up a few minutes after this pic, too. But the question is now raised: were the two waves largely all the same ducks, simply going back and forth based on their insecurity, or do we have shifts of a few different flocks that take turns coming in? I mean, I admit I’m probably a bit Anatidaecist, since with the exception of species and sex, they all look alike to me so I can’t tell individuals apart, meaning I’m open to solutions, but I suspect this will be one of those questions that remains unanswered.
Regardless, it’s a lot of ducks. And this was before the geese even wandered up for their shift…