fledglings

it is extraordinary how quickly one becomes disillusioned as soon as one starts being sentimental about animals. It's happened to me time after time – this latest experience was – well – to begin with – my knowledge about the breeding habits of mallards was pretty hazy. The mother of my ducklings, shameless hussy that she is, instead of spending two years devotedly taking care of them, stole away last week after she had been seen flicking tails with a drake in a secret pool nearby. It is due to my palpable and deplorable ignorance that it did not occur to me that I was reading about the kind of mallards that migrate... these ones don't. You'd think I may have remembered not noticing their absence in the winter and all that. And the drake was not their Daddy. No, he legged it as soon as the eggs were laid. The drake we'd fondly imagined was the Dad had only been hanging around their dear mamma waiting to have his wicked way with her as soon as he had persuaded her to abandon her young before they were even properly fledged. Oh the callousness of it all. Bachelor drakes are a bad lot when it comes to mallards, I'm afraid. There are usually more of them than the mummy ducks – and they resort to homosexuality and rape. I read that a drake who had been pursuing another drake that collapsed and died in a field made congress with its corpse. Not only do I have to realise that my adorable ducklings, who are now almost all growed up, and still hang around the pond where they was reared, have a (more than) 50% chance of growing up to be homosexual, necrophiliac rapists, but I actually witnessed one of them today being duck-raped by a bad bachelor drake. He picked on one of the smallest of the five, who was very frightened and distressed by the whole thing – squawking and trying to get away then being half-drowned by having its head pushed underwater when the drake was doing the daddy-duck thing to it. Yeeps I have to admit I was tempted to lob stones at him, only my aim is awful and I couldn't find any stones.
They are looking beautiful anyway in their brand new feathers – all mottley brown like their mother's, the young drakes won't get their male colouring yet. It was amazing how quickly the duckling fluff was replaced by feathers, they should be able to start flying soon, at least that will give them a better chance of escaping from predators, sexual and otherwise. Everything else has been growing with gay abundance. Moorhens racing about in the sun performing their strange mating rituals, coots rearing pathetically cute chicks in their untidy heaps of twigs, starlings hunting in the mud for worms and bathing in the shallow water on the edge of the pond. Mysterious purple columbine appearing in the grass and fresh-faced wild roses opening from pink pointed buds and the yellow irises out in droves around the fringes of the pond. On the weekend little boys – full of mud and energy – were wading in the pond catching tadpoles and the carp it seems has not just one shadowy companion, but at least three, which we saw with him one evening. My researches indicate that they are another variety of carp, because it is usual for various kinds of carp to congregate together and even interbreed. So much for the mystery, but it was very magical to have this sudden view into a secret underwater world.