I have an amazing Mother's Day story about how (mom gone somehow) a bunch of wood ducks were hatched in our neighborhood. We chased them down (learning amazing wood duck things like they CLIMB) and got them to a wildlife refuge. Most survived & got a new duck mother (non-wood)
The pretty ones are the males, of course. What I love about these little guys is how small they are relative to mallards, mottled ducks, and even black-bellied whistlers (they are smaller than mallards but have long legs so look the same size). When a male wood duck shows up, he looks like a toy.
He's gorgeous. Your Wood Ducks remind me of Mandarin Ducks but with different colouring (images from search using https://duckduckgo.com search engine).
That's a lovely story but a sad ending. I saw a Mandarin Duck on a pond in Parc Montsouris in Paris about 20 years ago. I'd never seen anything like it, a sort of Kabuki Dancer of Ducks.
This is my favorite duck, a Black-Bellied Whistler. I love the hot pink beak! But the best part is their squeak--they don't quack but have a sound like a squeaky toy. These ducks mate for life, and both raise the young. Their little families are adorable!
I live on a pond and bribe the ducks to come to my yard by giving them cracked corn, which they love. Mostly domestic mallards, mottled, black-bellied whistlers (my fav), and muscovys come. But once in a while a male wood duck comes with a group of mallards. He's utterly adorable, and so tiny!
Used to raise them to put on an enclosed public lake in Oklahoma, along with other North American species of waterfowl. Chinese wood ducks are just as beautiful. Thanks for the pic.
Lovely wood drake—I used American poet Wendell Berry’s beautiful poem “The Peace of Wild Things” with my cancer support poetry class last week; it’s perfect for these difficult times. “When despair for the world grows in me…I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water”:
I first saw one of these guys for the first time back in the late 1950s. Our northern Illinois river was heavily polluted and there were never any waterfowl around. We were walking home from school one spring afternoon close to the riverbank & saw one; at first we thought it was a toy, so brilliant!
Comments
He looks glorious.
G'day Basil, thanks for the follow 👍
Thank you for this majestic photo of this stately Wood Duck.
Sincerely,
Rachel Della Pietra
Connecticut, USA
Save our beautiful planet. 🌎