Duck! Duck! Argh! Told you twice!

Beloved reader, I introduce you now to one of my daily pastimes. Back in 2009 we started getting ducks ambling into our garden. One mother duck brought her children to eat from our yard (small birds having knocked grains to the ground). We fed her and her ducklings, because ducklings are simply adorable. Because this led them to come back time and again, I wrote at the time that I wouldn't be doing that again! It's late 2011 now, and we regularly have twenty or thirty ducks (two days ago we had about thirty-seven, yesterday morning it was thirty-one) descending on us for peanuts and bird-food. They were shy initially, but they're developing a sense of entitlement, the rotters. ;-)

They sit in the yard, outside my window, quacking, letting me know they have arrived and that food must be brought by their servants at once! They are rather adorable. Below you'll see a large female we haven't ever identified, lots of regular mallards and females, and a female white duck with a few marked offspring, the result of union with a mallard, we believe. The large female and the little white duck had male companions of their own type, but boys will be boys, and the poor dears seem to have recklessly got themselves eaten over the years. I hope you enjoy these pictures.