July 1

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Walking to yoga.  Looking east over West Park.

All these flowers arrived in the park at the same time as the pond.  Someone was really thinking about how to make this park better!

Looking north over the park.

Ducks in the pond.  The ducks formerly known as "baby" are now as big as their mother.  They can't fly yet, but they are practicing flapping, strengthening those wing muscles.

This duck and the one above are two different ducks.  See that their bills are different colors?  I'm sure this green bill, below, is one of this year's ducks.

Let's have a closer look at the ends of the wing feathers.  I will assert that the babies (well, ok, teenager ducks) cannot fly yet.

Here is an image of a mallard duck with its wings spread.  See all those big gray feathers at the outer and lower edges of the wings?  They have to have those kinds of feathers in order to fly.  Those flight feathers are the biggest feathers; it makes sense they are the last to be fully developed.  (Thank you, Stephen Heron, for making this image available!)


 By Stephen Heron [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


Now let's have a close look at the feathers on our ducks.  The next three pics are closeups of the two pics of our ducks earlier in this post.

I'm betting this is Mama.  Her bill is not green (as we saw above), and look how close the ends of her wing feathers get to her tail feathers.

Pretty sure this is a youngster.  Look how much space there is between the ends of the wing feathers, and the tail feathers.

In the course of this investigation, I learned that mallard ducks of both sexes have those blue feathers you see above, and that those feathers are on the middle section of the wing.

So cool, how easy it is to find out all of this stuff!!!!




On the way home after yoga.

I count 11 ducks, and I believe one is the mother, but can't swear to it.  This is a lot of ducks for a single mother to raise, all by herself, in a relatively small pond.  Good job, Mama Duck!

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