Tag: ducks

March 22nd – If you can, please visit Chasewater and feed the waterfowl on the boating lake. This mixture of ducks, swans, coots and geese are all ravenous due to the snow, cold weather and lack of benevolent visitors. The swans were so hungry, they forgot to be aggressive. I forgot to bring them food. I felt guilty, they clearly felt cheated,

Oh bugger.

October 19th – Working from home today, I spun out late afternoon on errands and to get some shopping. It was misty and grey, but all the same, I headed to Chasewater to check out the levels. It was pretty deserted at 5pm, and the boating lake was a peaceful soup of wildfowl, who flocked around me hoping I had food. The sheer variety in the duck population – domestic, blended with mallard, crossed with tufted ad infinitum – was fascinating. Ducks will mate with just about anything they can, and the diversity here is illuminating. 

I see the domestic white geese are still terrorising visitors, too, the aggressive devils. Goose bills are the stuff of nightmares, eh? Look at all those serrations…

July 29th – I had loads of work to do all day, and wasn’t feeling too bright. I took a spin out late evening, as the light died; it cheered me up no end. Hopping on the canal at Pier Street, around the bend opposite the Watermead, a young fox was learning to hunt. Sadly, his intended target – a mallard – was far sharper than him and flapped away in a bad-tempered fug of splashing, honking and feathers. Meanwhile, the woodpigeons, realising that Reynard Jr. was no threat, looked on in interest. Sorry about the poor quality pics, but I had to share.

July 18th – I cycled to work in Darlaston in a rainstorm, for what seemed like the thousandth time. I came up through Shelfied and Walsall with a heavy heart; the wind was against me and I was getting rather wet. As usual, I dropped on to the canal at Bridgman Street, and the rain ceased for a while and the the skies brightened. Near Pleck, I came upon this brood of ducklings, huddled together in the grass for warmth, their mother quacking reassuringly from the canal. They were quite tame, and I feel sure I could have reached out and picked one up. 

Further on, at Bentley Bridge, I noticed what can only be the sad remains of a Black Country Funeral, like a Viking one, but with less ambition. How unfortunate…

June 10th – For the second time in two days, I hit Chasewater. I was going on to ride the Sherbrook Valley on the Chase, but couldn’t resist a spin around the park in the sunshine. The weather was warm and soft, and I was in shorts and shirtsleeves. The boating pool was, as usual, a cloudy soup of mallards, canada geese, swans and coots, mingling with bird waste and discarded bread, but the waterfowl seem happy enough. Unusually, a mallard had her ducklings on the lake, including this rather fetching yellow one. A lovely thing indeed.

September 17th – Ducks have a very relaxed attitude to mating. In short, if it looks like a duck, it’ll attempt to start a family with it. This results in a number of curious examples of interbreeding in the wildfowl frequenting the boating lake at Chasewater. On an evening spin around the park, I stopped to study the waterfowl and noted this curious bird. Is this a tufted duck cross? The tufted barnet is actually quite amusing…