Pond & Marsh

Yesterday morning, as I was standing on the dock just beyond the outlet of our pond when a female Mallard emerged cruising with her six ducklings out of the pond and into Weesuck Creek. How cute, I thought in spite of myself. Mallards are, at best, only near-natives, and they have largely replaced the native Black Duck as our common local breeding duck; in any case, I try not to get too sentimental about local wildlife but it's hard to help it with baby ducklings. Then, in the late afternoon, as I walked down to the pond, Mama Mallard appeared all by herself, swimming in the tidal stream coming out of the marsh and making soft, urgent noises. Where are the ducklings? A rustling in the vegetation on the opposite bank gave them away. Sure enough, after working their way up along the bank under cover, they popped out into the pond just behind mama -- first one, then two, then.... nobody! Just two little ducklings swimming after their mother up the pond and out the outlet into the wider creek. What happened to the other four? We don't have Snapping Turtles anymore (the pond is too salty and tidal for them nowadays) and there are no raptors around to my knowledge. My immediate suspicions fell on the crows. There were two young crows hanging around the pond and at least one noisy adult. Bloody blaggart crows! Catching and eating cute little ducklings! Yeah, I know, they have to live too! Nature, red it tooth and claw, doesn't follow human morality and isn't always pretty or cute.

Well, my dark suspicions were ill-founded. This morning, Mother Mallard and her brood of six were right in place in the pond and Momma Mallard and her two darling ducklings were in the open water area in the middle of the marsh. There were two different broods. Once again, Momma Mallard show that she was willing to abandon her little darlings for a moment to ensure their safety. Even before I reached the open water area, she had flown up and circled around, checking me out before she returned to the open puddle to urge her chicks to swim and run to safety behind the sprouting tufts of spartina.

There were no less than three Willets out this morning, two of them perched on the floating dock that floated into the marsh on a storm tide this winter; the other was on the scraggly cedar bv the pond. The Tree and Bank Swallows that I have seen swooping around the marsh this spring have not been in evidence in the past few days but the Purple Martins and Barn Swallows were out hunting the no-see-ems that were merging in good numbers on this warm, humid, sunny and dewy near-summer morning. There was also a Saltmarsh Sparrow perched in the grass and showing his flat head and orangey face. This species -- as its name suggests, it is virtually confined to saltmarshes -- is common on the outer marshes and reasonably regular on our wetlands but often hard to see, especially now that the spartina alterniflora is really beginning to cover the marsh with a tall carpet of green.

Eric Salzman