{"id":42667,"date":"2026-09-23T13:56:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T17:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=42667"},"modified":"2026-09-23T13:56:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T17:56:00","slug":"been-so-so-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2026\/09\/been-so-so-long\/","title":{"rendered":"Been so, so long"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a few wood duck photos to feature, a teaser until I get the video clips together, and I was thinking it’d be a nice change because we hadn’t had wood ducks for a while. So, exhausting researcher that I am, I looked for the last appearance of “wood duck” on the blog.<\/p>\n

Which was yesterday<\/a>, since they appeared in the video. But okay, the last appearance before that<\/em> was late June<\/a>, so we’re going with that and pretending that the species in the video was something else. Okay?<\/p>\n

Not too long after the ducklings had become too big to effectively fit what people imagine when they hear the word, “duckling,” the wood ducks (Aix sponsa<\/em>) had almost disappeared from the pond, helped perhaps by the drastic drop in the water level, limiting their swimming access to specific reduced portions of it. But since this happened last year too, we think it’s just a habitual thing. The water level has bounced back to what we’re used to now, and they’ve (perhaps coincidentally) been coming back again, though there’s a curious detail about it.<\/p>\n

\"cluster
The morning and evening raids after the corn we distribute were no longer regular, sometimes occurring, sometimes not, most often in the mornings. But for a short while, they were gathering instead at the base of Haunted Tree<\/a>, which you can see is half-obscured by foliage from my normal vantage point. Every one of them, however, was in juvenile plumage, meaning this year’s ducklings – not a full adult to be seen among them. We found this curious, and don’t know the reason or meaning behind it, but the result is that their coloring has a lot more variation in it.<\/p>\n

\"late
The female in front looks almost<\/em> like an adult, but the male in the back is definitely between patterns, showing more of the iridescent blue in the wings than the adults normally do with almost none of the blacks. The beak is pretty much on-cue though, and the eyes are red, or reddish at least.<\/p>\n

A nice comparison was captured yesterday morning, though.<\/p>\n

\"two
Both males, both this year’s brood, but you could be excused if you thought they were different sexes or species. The one in front shows more of the iridescent green on the head, but lacks the body coverts that would hide the blue wing feathers, while the one in back looks less scruffy and more ‘complete,’ yet shows nearly none of the adult coloration. Which as a reminder, looks like this:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"adult
Considering that, even early this year before nesting season, we were seeing the occasional duck sporting incomplete adult colors, I suspect that adult plumage doesn’t fully come in until the mating season change erupts in late winter\/early spring. It’s still curious that no adults seem to be hanging out with the current crew, though.<\/p>\n

Another, in the tree on Duck Island:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"late
The white ‘chin strap’ seems to be the first thing to develop after the duckling colors, making the sexes distinguishable fairly early, since even the females’ white eye rings seem to develop later than this. Notice that the male bill colors are only halfway there, and the eye might<\/em> be developing a hint of red, but even under high magnification, it’s not distinctly noticeable, though we are<\/em> looking from the shady side here.<\/p>\n

Like I said, video to come (eventually,) but sometime after that, you might notice a change in the scenery;<\/strong> we had one cluster of trees on the pond edge come down this morning, falling just behind both Haunted Tree and Duck Island, so there’s a bunch of loose background foliage that will be dying out. There’s little point in trying to remove them, seeing how they’re completely in the water, as shallow as it is, but we’re also curious to see if the beavers take advantage of this windfall (well, technically a rain<\/em>fall, since we believe they toppled because of the rain weight and the fact that they had shallow roots in the pond bottom.) This may be another opportunity, though most likely for night photos or video. We’ll see…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a few wood duck photos to feature, a teaser until I get the video clips together, and I was thinking it’d be a nice change because we hadn’t had wood ducks for a while. So, exhausting researcher that I am, I looked for the last appearance of “wood duck” on the blog. Which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[4948,8635,6915,5592,4947],"class_list":["post-42667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","tag-aix-sponsa","tag-haunted-tree","tag-juvenile-plumage","tag-juveniles","tag-wood-duck"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42667"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42677,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42667\/revisions\/42677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}