Ducks? I thought I was going quackers
WILDLIFE can conjure up plenty of surprises and a couple waddled across my back lawn the other day.
Seated at the dining room table I glanced through the rear window and nearly toppled off my chair. There under the apple tree was a pair of mallard ducks – a streaky brown female and by her side a male in glorious plumage with bottle green head.
It is not often one gets excited by ducks, but this was the first ever wildfowl sighting in my west Dartmoor garden in all of the twenty years I have lived here. I have a pond at the far end and have recently cleared around it, so they may have spotted it from the air and thought it worth a look. There is also a small stream along the inside of the hedgerow border and they spent a contented hour paddling about and tucking in to the various aquatic plants before moving on.
If they were prospecting for a potential place to nest then they were wise not to settle here as our comings and goings would have been a constant source of disturbance. The largest ever bird to successfully nest in the garden was a female pheasant some years back which sat on a clutch of eggs under the entrance to one of my beehives – safely guarded from predators by 40,000-odd bees flying to and fro over her head.
But I imagine the mallards would have struggled to find adequate cover and peace and quiet to raise young – although it would be a delight to see a family of fluffy ducklings taking their first dip in the pond.
The mallard may be our most common species of duck, but in my garden it joins the list of my rarest sightings – along with a passing kingfisher, a ten-minute visit from a yellowhammer and a water rail which ventured up the stream one snowy winter.
On town ponds one might take mallards for granted, but out of context you realise what stunning and characterful birds they are. This pair looked pretty wary and I like to think that, unlike their bread-eating urban counterparts, these were truly wild ducks searching for a spot on Dartmoor to nest.
A special, if surreal, spring sighting.