I have been feeling rather guilty after having read on-line that feeding bread to ducks can damage their health, making them overweight and malnourished. On the other hand the London Parks guidelines state that it's ok to give them some bread as long as you don't give them too much. The dilemma! I suppose we will compromise by giving them a very small quantity of healthy wholemeal bread, but part of me wants to be a purist and abstain from what has given us considerable pleasure indeed.
Over the past month we have watched four broods of ducklings emerge on the lake, sitting on a secluded though rather muddy slope, made secret and charming by overhanging trees and ivied banks. There are “the ten”, “the seven” and “the five”, all broods of mallard ducklings, each a little younger than the last. Yesterday a brood of about six tufted ducks appeared, but they were particularly shy and didn't come close to us at all. “The ten” mallards are quite a miracle as not one duckling had been lost from the brood. They are always terribly hungry and converge on scraps of bread with lightning speed. There is an almost frightening milling and zipping around at very high speeds whenever they are being fed. At one stage the mother duck heroically abstained from eating any pieces if her young were trying to get at them. Recently she has joined in the general scramble, snatching bits away from them. No doubt she has started starving after all her weeks of abstinence and watchfulness. Apparently rearing young puts great strain on mother ducks and a lot of them die. I had felt that the bread we managed to give the mothers was helping to sustain the mothers during this time. Can the bits of bread that we have thrown to moorhens and watched them eagerly carry off to their secret and hidden nests to feed their young really be doing them harm? Perhaps it could be helping them survive, I hope so, obviously if ducks, or any other waterfowl are fed to the extent that they stop foraging for their natural food, they will become malnourished and overweight. However I feel that a certain extent of limited feeding actually helps mothers and their ducklings to survive at a very crucial time. In the wild they would be at a greater risk of starvation, as well as being more vulnerable to predation. Having said that, I think feeding wild ducks and other water fowl in a natural environment is really unethical, because it messes with their natural habits and can make them sluggish and less mobile as well as getting them out of the habit of looking for their own food.
I am quite concerned by the effect that feeding has had on the 5 juvenile ducks on the pond, which we watched grow up from little ducklings. At present only 3 of them remain on the pond, I think they have split up into 2 groups, the rest are perhaps somewhere on the canal. Because the pond is so close to the path and quite exposed, they may have come in for a lot more feeding from the general public than most ducks do. They are very big for juveniles and perhaps have become fat and lazy and a bit too tame, inclined to approach groups of people who could harm them, (unfortunately, there are some teenage gangs who are violent and destructive and hang out there sometimes;) and I have not seen them foraging for food very much lately. We have been giving them a few bits of bread when we go past, so perhaps it is a habit we should give up. We have been doing it out of a feeling that they would be missing out somehow if we didn't, when in fact it may not be in their best interests after all.
I do regret having unwittingly done something that could have harmed the health of the ducks we get so much pleasure out of watching. Obviously there is some controversy out there on the Internet about the extent to which its ok to feed urban waterfowl. I really believed that we were helping their survival by supplementing their diet a little bit, but not too much. Fortunately I know that we have not stopped the ducklings from searching for food in their usual style. All of them still paddle and dart about snatching insects from the air. The very youngest are the fastest and seem to skim along the very water-surface, they are so buoyant and light. Recently we enjoyed a particularly inspiring sight. The migrating film of tiny green duckweed had moved to another part of the lake, leaving the water almost perfectly crystal clear, the muddy bottom some 2 feet down perfectly visible. After we had finished feeding “the ten”, some of them started diving to the bottom, looking for food down there. It was incredible to watch them underwater like that. It's hard to describe the brilliance of the moment, the mystery of the underwater and the vital fresh energy that ducklings have. Their sleek, steam-lined duckling forms suddenly transposed into a different world. Searching in a water-world, swimming joyously with a fierce wild energy and completely free in their natural ways. Sleepily, dreamily, some black carp swam past, just to complete the watery mystery of the scene.
At the moment roses are blooming in abundance. The white paper moon trumpets of bindweed (or convolvulvus) are wending their way amongst the other vegetation. White water lilies are glowing mysteriously among the lily pads on the pond. Everywhere flowers that bloomed in spring are being replaced by green seed-pods and fruits that will turn golden-brown, or purple, or red as the summer sun burns down. Spring is over now, the breeding season of the ducks draws to a close. The drakes are all beginning to lose their breeding plumage by degrees. Their iridescent brown heads turning dark brown, the bits that remain, even more brilliantly green when mottled and worked it this way. On a breast that was deep reddish brown , the brand new, pale gold, mottled feathers of the “female” plumage have appeared, making the drake into quite an Egyptian duck, multi-coloured, boasting feathers of brand new gold, freshly enamelled from the Earth's store. In the secret lives of ducklings, mothers watch them beneath the low boughs of shady trees. The waters hold a secret fish world that they can dip into and explore. This young life will grow towards adulthood all too fast.
We have seen some baby moorhens at last. We have been waiting for this, knowing that all the while they have been secretly reared in secret nests here and there in the reeds or among overhanging branches on the lakeside. It was well worth the wait. There were two of them, with their mother, running about on a plank that has been moored to the edge of the canal. They are really the most delightfully comical creatures I think I have ever seen – like black balls of fluff wearing clown shoes. Their black feet are enormously too big for their bodies and they run about with their heads lowered in the way the parents do, it is just too lovely! To top it all I saw another of my very favourite new, new things when some children in the park ran up to us with plastic glasses to show us the teeny tiny baby frogs they had caught which were swimming inside. I think they really appreciated getting such an enthusiastic response from adults. I haven't seen tiddly little frogs like that since I was that age myself and had felt rather bereaved at the thought that the tadpoles in the pond would most likely progress to frogdom without me being fortunate enough to see them. It's an extraordinary sight to see a perfectly formed frog, so very much alive, and barely the size of a child's fingernail.
