bird watching

Focusing on Mallards Part IV: Positioning My Perspective(s)

Rae SpencerLeave a comment

Content warning

This multi-part blog post contains references to the hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds. This particular installment contains references to hunting other prey and killing chickens from a backyard flock. If you decide not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Photograph of five Mallard ducklings resting on the stone border of our dragonfly pond after a tiring swim. Four of the ducklings are settled in and nodding off, while the fifth is still standing and fidgeting. The ducklings are fluffy with down (immature feathers), have yellow and brown markings, and each still has a visible remnant of egg tooth at the beak tip. They were less than 24 hours old when this photo was taken.
Photograph of five Mallard ducklings resting on the stone border of our dragonfly pond. Four of the ducklings are settled in and nodding off, while the fifth is still standing and fidgeting.

Livestock are living stock. And sometimes pets.

Until they are not.

Growing up in rural Tennessee, I had daily exposure to food chain realities. Our freezers (we had two) were stocked with meat from assorted livestock we raised. Livestock we loved. Chickens and cows, during my memory years, with vague early memories of pigs.

A 1970s-era photo, scanned from our family archive, of four fancy chickens roaming free in our yard. Two of the chickens have dark feathers with reddish highlights, one with additional iridescent green highlights on its wing feathers. A third chicken has almost all light reddish-brown feathers. The fourth's feathers are black over its head and neck, reddish tan across its chest, and gray over its wings, back, abdomen, and tail. The gray feathers on its back and abdomen are fluffier and downier than regular feathers. All four chickens have topknots of varying fluffiness and fanciness. All four are notably dainty.
A 1970s-era photo of four “banties” (bantams), dainty chickens with variously fancy topknots, roaming free in our yard.
A 1970s-era photograph scanned from our family archive. Three young cows are standing near a fence line, pasture and woods in most of the background, with one wall of a weathered wooden shed visible. The cows are browsing through a scatter of trampled hay. The cows' coat colors indicate their mixed heritage. The cow closest to the camera strongly favors a Brown Swiss milk cow: its body is mostly dark brown with lighter shading on its legs and ears and a very pale muzzle with a dark nose. The middle cow likely has some Charolais beef breeding: its coloration is a patchy mix of pale tans and white. The cow furthest from the lens has markings typical of Hereford beef cattle: primarily reddish coloration with white legs, a white stripe down its back, and a white face.
A 1970s-era photograph of three young cows standing near a fence line with pasture and woods in the background.
Another 1970s-era photo, scanned from the family archive. In this photo, three red pigs are grazing in a dry, clean patch of short pasture grass. The pigs are likely of Duroc descent, given their red coloration and the widespread popularity of the Duroc breed.
A 1970s-era photo of three red pigs grazing a patch of short pasture grass.

Our chickens and cows and pigs had individual names and individual personalities. We raised them and cared for them and loved them. But food chain reality means that livestock exists to be eaten. No matter how cherished. No matter how tame.

In this 1970s-era photograph, a red-and-white Hereford cow stands over her very young and very sleepy calf. The calf is red and white, like its mother, and its coat is thick and curly and damp in places. Just behind this cow and calf, a small cluster of black cows have gathered. These background cows would be of Angus breeding. All of the cows are standing in a patch of scattered straw and hay. The ground under the straw and hay would probably have been a trampled mire of mud. The bare-limbs tree line, just visible, indicates a winter setting.
Yet another 1970s-era photograph from the family archive. Here, a red-and-white Hereford cow stands over her very young calf. The calf is curled up on the ground, sleepy eyes and ears drooping.

Off to slaughter

Our cows and pigs were slaughtered and processed by local-ish butchers, but Mother slaughtered our chickens with a hatchet. Then she cleaned and portioned their carcasses while I collected and bagged bloody feathers.

In this 1970s-era photograph, Mother is feeding a flock of some 15 chickens, along with 3 white ducks, from a repurposed coffee can filled with whatever mix of feed and corn was on the day's menu. The chickens are mostly gray-and-white speckled Dominiques (we called them "domineckers"), with a single white leghorn rooster and a few Rhode Island red hens. In the background, our white station wagon is parked under a pole shed, along with several bicycles. The photo is poorly focused with faded colors.
In this 1970s-era photograph, Mother is feeding our small flock of chickens and ducks. At the moment this photo was snapped, Mother was bent over, using her free hand to enforce order. If photos came with sound, you would hear her scolding the greedy birds and coaxing the shy ones.1

In reviewing family archives for this post, I was struck by how similar the above scene is to a photo from the early 1900s, found in our maternal grandmother’s album. There was clearly something generational going on at our table.

Scanned image of an early 1900s photograph from my grandmother's photo album. The sepia-toned black-and-white image shows a flock of large chickens foraging in a tight bunch, probably having just been given feed. Some of the chickens have dark feathers and some have light feathers. The background is bare-limbed trees (winter), a large flat field, a post-and-wire fence with a closer fence having its lower section blocked off by tin. There is also a small outbuilding with an open door, with what appears to be a tractor parked in front.
Early 1900s-era photograph of some twenty chickens foraging in a bare yard with farm equipment, fences, and an outbuilding in the background.

Wildlife can also be living stock, to a hunter

Small and sundry prey

In addition to eating chicken, beef, and pork raised on our property, we sometimes ate squirrels and rabbits shot by my father and brothers. It’s possible that our beagles sometimes helped on these hunts. (It’s more likely that our beagles hindered these hunts.)

A small square photograph of three beagles, motion-blurred, play-fighting on top of a wooden doghouse. Shadows of fencing are visible on the doghouse. I believe these three beagles are Daisy, Fella, and Little Bit, though we also had a fourth beagle named Dan.
A 1970s-era photo of three naughty beagles play-fighting on top of a doghouse.

I helped skin and clean the squirrels and rabbits, and I remember being fascinated by their soft fur. I also remember Mother muttering and tsking while she cooked squirrel and rabbit meals. She breaded and fried the meat, and served barely edible, extremely tough portions with open disdain.

I developed a lasting case of meat snobbery, rooted in Mother’s disdain. Squirrels and rabbits were in the lowest edibility tier. Nothing lower was served. No frog legs. No snake, turtle, or alligator meat. No opossums.

Something generational was going on at our table there, too, but in the opposite sense of backyard flocks. Mother preserved her family’s tradition of raising chickens for slaughter, but put a permanent end to the family tradition of opossum hunting. (Scroll quickly if you don’t care to see a sepia-toned group of early 1900s ancestors showing off a bunch of dead, dying, or faking-death opossums, along with the dogs that facilitated the hunt.)

Scanned image of a photograph from my grandmother's photo album. In the album, the hand-printed caption read "The morning after our great Opposum hunt. 'We won't forget.'" This deep-sepia-toned black-and-white photo, circa early 1900s, shows five people standing in a row with a fourth person kneeling in front. Posing outdoors in a yard, the people are holding at least three opossums. The opossums are either dead, dying, or faking death. The woman to the far left is holding a smallish black-and-white dog, while the man kneeling in front is restraining two hounds. Probable (possible?) identifications include standing L to R: Sarah Harrison, Georgia Linton, Charlie Linton, Bill Linton, and an unknown girl; kneeling in front: Buck Linton.
In my grandmother’s album, this photo is labelled “The morning after our great Opposum hunt. ‘We won’t forget’.”

That’s my grandmother, second from the left, one hand behind her back and the other hand dangling an opossum for the camera. This particular hunt (it wasn’t the only time the family hunted and ate opossums) was special because one of the cousins (Sarah Harrison, standing on the far left) had come to visit.

Scanned image of a sepia-toned black-and-white photograph in my great aunt's photo album. In the album, the hand-printed caption reads "Sarah Harrison / Popman's cousin / 'the Possum hunt'". The outdoor photo shows a woman wearing a plaid dress with intricately pieced trim and pockets, white stockings, and white shoes. The woman is holding two dead, dying, or faking-death opossums, one opossum in each hand. The woman's dark hair is pinned up, and she is looking at the camera but not smiling. Beside her is a smallish black-and-white dog with a bobbed tail and half-pricked ears. The dog is looking up, attention fixed on the woman and opossums.
This photo was in a great aunt’s album. The photo is labelled: “Sarah Harrison / Popman’s cousin / ‘the Possum hunt’ “2

I should add that Mother’s disdain was not coherently taxonomic. Reptiles, amphibians, and insects were off the menu, but so were ducks, geese, and goats. Which meant some of our livestock were exempt from slaughter. What’s more, “dairy” came from cows and cows exclusively. There’s no logic here, only family and cultural tradition.

Cue any stand-up comic mocking a southern drawl. For that matter, cue any bully standing in their own tradition, mocking other traditions.

Photograph from 2021 of a white-tailed deer trotting beside a paved path at Back Bay Wildlife Refuge in Virginia Beach, VA. The background and foreground are winter-toned in oranges and browns of dormant shrubs and grasses, with occasional greens of live oaks and wax myrtles typical of coastal Virginia. The deer's head and tail are up, ears angled to listen behind her, in a body language that suggests alertness verging on alarm but not panic. Moments after I snapped this photo, the deer vanished into the tall seagrass.
Photograph of a white-tailed deer trotting beside a paved path at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. In my southern-Tennessee lexicon, “venison” very specifically refers to deer meat. I only learned in my middle-age that the word “venison” has different and wider definitions in different cultures.

In my late teen and early adult years, my oldest sister’s boyfriend often gifted us venison. I was particularly fond of what I called “Bambi roast” and “Bambi spaghetti”. Bambi, it seems, ranked high in my edible-mammal hierarchy. A bit below pet chickens and cows, but certainly above squirrels and rabbits. Which were at least on the list. Unlike opossums.

Here in my middle years, my childhood memories of skinning squirrels and rabbits seem dreamlike. As if those skinny arms and small hands weren’t my own. After all, any brief stroll through my blog history will find some tender post about squirrel and rabbit nests. I cringe, extra, thinking about any of the yard’s visitors heading into a hunter’s sights, then into a frying pan or stew pot.

Photograph from the spring of 2024. Five Mallard ducklings, less than two days old, are floating in a cluster in our dragonfly pond. Two of the ducklings have their heads cocked, one eye looking skyward. They are responding to an alarm call from their mother, who had spotted a hawk wheeling overhead.
Yes, Mallard babies. I’m talking about you. I’m aching to protect you.

But I didn’t always equate animals, my own pets and livestock in particular, with the meat on my table.

Further aside… so many eggs

Gathering the eggs

On mornings when my oldest sister was too tired or busy or sick to tend the chickens, I was roused and sent in her place. I remember egg gathering as sleepy, smelly, spidery work. Early morning work. (I’ve never been an early morning kind of girl.)

Egg gathering meant wrestling the chicken pen latch, which grew tighter each year as the posts and gate warped. Then I had to put down my bucket—to unclip the rusty chicken house latch and heave the rickety door over hills of weeds, dirt, and dung—and usually had two or three hens perched in my hair and on my shoulders by the time I bent to retrieve the bucket. Finally, I would stumble over the plank sill into the warm, dimly lit interior.

(Yes, I always stumbled. My severe astigmatism couldn’t navigate the sudden change from light to dark, and the hens dashed in and out through the door in frenzied delight.)

Our chicken house was closer in size to a closet than a house. I don’t have any chicken pen/chicken house photos to share, but almost any wire pen around almost any vine-covered tin-roof-and-plank outbuilding would be an accurate visual.

Veils of cobweb hung from the low rafters. Snakes, flies, wasps, spiders, and light entered and exited through gaps in the walls and roof. A short row of nest boxes lined one wall. The floor was dirt, feathers, dung, and broken shells. The chicken house smelled strongly of chickens and dust, but also of cat urine (from our army of yard cats) and dog feces (from the adjoining dog pen) and, every so often, of predators.3

Shooing hens from their nests, or reaching beneath those who refused to be shooed, I gathered eggs by touch more than sight. (It’s not as easy as it sounds. Our hens didn’t give up their eggs willingly, especially to the tentative little sister of their usual egg-gatherer. Wing slaps left bruises, and claws and beaks drew blood.)

The warm, sticky, tough-shelled eggs that I gathered didn’t feel like they held nascent chicks and ducklings. 

A 1980s-era photograph of a red hen and her brood of variously yellow, tan, or striped chicks, all safely enclosed in one of our wood-and-chicken-wire coops. The stocky hen shows strong Rhode Island Red characteristics, but the chicks' mixed genetics were more typical of our flock.
A 1980s-era photograph of a red hen and her brood of eleven(ish) striped chicks, all safely enclosed in one of our wood-and-chicken-wire coops.

Breaking the eggs

Our father began leaving during my pre-teen years. He sold the cows, let the fences lay where they fell, and stopped shoring up the barn and sheds. After he finished leaving, neglect cascaded into decay. Vines pulled down the chicken house and the gate fell off the pen.

Both pre- and post-chicken house era, egg gathering mistakes were inevitable. In the chaos of the crowded, rickety henhouse, broody laying hens stole eggs from the adjacent nests of setting hens. Predators and predator alarms rolled and bounced eggs between nest boxes. An egg laid by a setter a week or more ago, carefully incubated since, might end up alone in a layer’s nest. An egg laid by a layer last night might end up in a two-weeks-along setter’s nest.

After our flocks were entirely free-roaming, they hid their nests so well that eggs were often days old before being found. Eventually, increasing incidences of “bad eggs”, coupled with decreasing egg demand as siblings moved out, halted all egg collecting.

Late 1980s-era photograph of five large white eggs in a rough nest on the ground. The flat nest is made only of trampled grass and dry, dead weeds. The nest is positioned beneath an unused steel livestock gate that is leaning against the wall of a post-and-panel shed.
Photograph of five eggs, probably duck eggs, in a nest on the ground. This nest was tucked between an unused livestock gate and the outer corner of a shed.

The term “bad eggs” most obviously referred to rotting or rotten eggs. The kind that burst on their own or floated in water. But “bad eggs” also encompassed fertilized eggs that were mistakenly collected mid-incubation.

When an incomplete carcass, some mid-development stage of a chick or duckling, spilled from an egg I had cracked, I writhed with regret. It happened often enough, in my early years, that I still crack eggs into a separate bowl when cooking.

After our egg-collecting years ended, our increasingly feral flock was left to hatch and raise what young they could in whatever nests they chose.

Late 1980s-era photograph of a gray-and-tan feathered game hen with black tail feathers. The hen is setting on a nest that she made in a deep pile of straw left in the bottom of a large wooden box that once held bales of straw. The colors in this photograph are over-bright due to using a flashbulb on the camera, and the image is somewhat blurry.
A late 1980s photo of a game hen (conveniently named “Game Hen”) sitting a nest of eggs in a straw-lined box.
Late 1980s-era photograph of the inside of an ancient out-of-service livestock trailer that served as a shed for storing straw, hay, and feed. The trailer's flooring is wooden planks laid between steel bars. A massive, open-topped wooden crate/box is positioned in the middle of the trailer, an overturned tin can is on the floor in front of the box, and a large weathered 50-gallon oil drum is to the right. Game Hen is perched at the entryway, looking out. A reddish hen is perched on the edge of the large box, and another hen (mostly in shadow) is perched on the oil drum's closed lid. In the far background, shadows and reflections show equipment, bottles, and boxes stored (and long forgotten) on a shelf. The massive box once held bales of straw, but by this time held only a deep bed of leftover straw which was used by the cats and chickens for warm bedding. The oil drum held bags of feed. We kept the trailer doors closed, most of the time, but there were plenty of holes through the sides and bottom that the chickens, cats, rats, and opossums used for entry- and exit-ways.
A late 1980s view inside the “trailer” (a dilapidated, out-of-service livestock trailer that we treated as a bonus shed for feed storage). The massive wooden open-topped box/crate (center frame) once held bales of straw, so it was lined with broken bales. Inside this box, in the right back corner, was Game Hen’s nest.
Late 1980s-era photograph of 11 white eggs and 7 brown eggs in a nest made of straw. This was Game Hen's nest to sit, though the eggs were likely provided by multiple hens. The nest was in the far back-right corner of a massive open-topped wooden crate/box the sat in the middle of the ancient out-of-service livestock trailer we used for straw, hay, and feed storage.
The same late 1980s nest, photographed after bribing Game Hen with feed. Heaped in the nest are 11 white eggs and 7 brown eggs. The hens literally shared prime nesting spots.
Late 1980s-era photograph of a golden-eyed black-and-white cat (Mischief) nursing a newborn litter of kittens. All are settled in a deep, warm nest of straw, loosely lined with an old blue shirt. There are five kittens, three tortoiseshell and two solid white (destined to develop silver-and-gray "points" typical of siamese, but with the much longer hair typical of ragdoll cats). This litter of kittens was delivered and nursed in the massive wooden open-topped crate/box that we used to store straw in the ancient out-of-service livestock trailer that served as our feed shed.
Another late 1980s-era photograph, taken in the exact same spot in the trailer’s box of straw as the above nest photos. This is my cat Mischief nursing a newborn litter of five beautiful kittens. Two of these kittens will reappear later in this post, in a photo taken after they were grown.

Growing up in rural Tennessee, eating the animals and dissociating

While my egg-mistake memories are mostly visual, wetly curled bodies in a puddle of albumin, my memories of chicken, squirrel, and rabbit carcasses are sticky with remorse and smell like blood, grease, and guilt left out in the sun.

But expressing regret, remorse, or guilt at the table was forbidden. So was refusing to eat what was served. I don’t remember being told these rules, nor do I remember hearing these rules explained to my siblings. For that matter, I don’t remember learning these rules.

It is this lack of learning, this full memory cache with no record of creation, that warrants using the word “dissociated”. As a girl growing up in rural Tennessee, I dissociated from the eggs and meat on our table.

I coped with my forbidden regret, remorse, and guilt by inventing a private delusion, by defining eggs and meat as a different form of matter than living animals.

Mid-to-late-1980s-era photograph of our back yard, taken in late winter/early spring (indicated by the budding saplings in the background). Our small mixed flock of chickens, ranging in color from red-and-black to solid white, are resting, foraging, and roaming around the trunks and roots of a massive maple tree. An ancient out-of-service aluminum-sided livestock trailer is parked to the left, our wire-and-chain-link dog pen is in the left background, and a weathered old doghouse is in the middle background (used by cats, chickens, and yard dogs for warmth).
Mid-1980s photograph of our mostly free-roaming flock. We wouldn’t have eaten many of their eggs, in their later years, and their tough old carcasses would have been among the last added to the freezer. The trailer is visible to the left, with the dog pen behind it. The derelict chicken pen is hidden in the far center background, behind the row of saplings and shrub-like weeds.

Depression on top of dissociation

The photo immediately below is more metaphor than image. The worn paint and sagging shingles on our house and concrete-block wellhouse, the decaying barn-remnants to the far right, the unkempt pasture and yard, and the overgrowth marking downed fences. All of these illustrate the state of our dysfunctional household during my teen and young adult years.

A late-1980s or early-1990s-era photograph of our back yard. The edge of the house is just in view to the left, with worn paint on the wooden siding and facia boards. The concrete-block wellhouse, with its wide concrete stoop, sits just behind the house. Here, the wellhouse's roof is in bad disrepair, sagging with rot. Two cats and a hen are perched on the wellhouse, waiting to be fed. The yard is patchy, with some areas of dead grass and some areas of overgrown grass. The crumbled and rotting remains of a sloped loading chute and our barn are visible to the far right, and a heap of discarded debris (the remains of a fallen pole shed roof, the old pig pen fence, the old pig shed, and one wall of the barn) is thinly hidden behind a tall (>6 foot) curtain of dead brush. The woods in the far background are winter-bare.
A late 1980s- or early 1990s-era photo taken in the back yard. Perched atop our concrete block wellhouse, two cats and a red hen are waiting to be fed. The cats, Annie (right, tortoiseshell colored) and Gizmo (left, ragdoll marked) grew up out of the exact trailer-straw litter pictured above. The hen, whose name I’ve lost to time, was one of Game Hen’s daughters.

The hungry cats and hen on the wellhouse roof, waiting for a meal of table scraps and cheap kibble, are confusion, sorrow, and loneliness. This was the era of boyfriend venison and day-old bread. Of freezers stocked from clearance ads. Of oldest sister tending the garden in the dark of too-early mornings and too-late evenings because she was working three jobs while going to college.

We no longer ate the livestock we raised and loved, but clearance-case chicken and ground beef added a new facet to my dissociation. Grocery eggs and meat were always cold and bloodless, had never been embodied in the yard. And I had learned what it meant to be hungry.

Re-associating, for health reasons

Or, “Thanks for the genes, Dad”

My father died of heart disease at the age of 52. I was mid-teens, and he seemed so old. But he wasn’t old. I am, currently, older than 52.

I don’t feel so old.

I like being me, and I would like to continue being me for some good long number of years past 52.

Perseverating on 52

One of the ways I’ve packaged and carried grief is a fixation on 52nd birthdays. As each of my four older siblings passed 52, I breathed a bit easier. Long before I reached 52, I began researching and planning. Partly because of the grief fixation, but also because my cholesterol levels have been alarming physicians since I was a teen.

Note to father: Next time, maybe try leaving us money, instead.

Statins and exercise are no match for my father’s genes. My last resort for living past 52 was a complete overhaul of my diet. (I should have started there, but I’m a silly human with silly human habits.)

Call it plant based. Call it vegetarian. Call it desperation.

An unexpected side-effect of my diet overhaul has been re-associating with animal protein. My health ambitions were easier to realize when I reminded myself that pork is slaughtered pigs. That beef is slaughtered cows. That chicken is slaughtered chickens. That grocery eggs come from hens housed in industry conditions, not back yards.

Without my dad’s cholesterol, I would probably still perceive meat and living stock as unrelated forms of matter.

Enter the Mallards

Timing is everything, and my various perspectives and journeys are not random. If you are still reading, you might be starting to see a signal. Or not.

What looks like signal to me likely looks like noise to others.

Perhaps in a later post I’ll explain how a literature search through the history of prion testing catalyzed an ongoing reaction between a brood of suburban ducklings, a fetish-level case of nostalgia, a dysfunctional family history, and a stubborn set of lipid genes, resulting in this multi-part Mallard post.

Photo from the spring of 2024, of a Mallard hen and her brood of ducklings swimming in the dragonfly pond. Here the hen is reaching up, tugging seeds from a long grass seedhead that had sagged over the pond's edge. One of her ducklings is reaching up, sampling the grassy seeds, while the others are milling around, watching.
In this photo from the spring of 2024, a female Mallard duck shows her brood how to eat grass seeds from a seedhead dangling over the dragonfly pond.

For the present, I’m a recovering carnivore lured to herbivory by a longing to live past 52. I grew up in a rural environment where the animal protein on our table came from our own yard, pasture, and woods. And I’ve known what it is to be hungry.

These perspectives matter, though it’s not entirely up to me to decide how they matter.

In the next episode…

Mallard hunting is big business.

Image scanned from my great aunt's photo album. This black-and-white photo, vaguely sepia-toned, shows a man in thick winter garb—newsboy(?) hat, hunting jacket (lots of pockets), bulky pants, and worn boots—holding a long gun and two dead Mallard ducks. In the album, a hand-printed caption on an adjoining photo identified this man as Harry Kenyon.
Early 1900s photograph of a duck hunter holding a gun and two dead Mallards. This photograph was scanned from a great aunt’s photo album. The hunter’s name was Harry Kenyon. I do not know who he was or how his image landed in my great aunt’s photo album.

2. While I’m perfectly awful at recognizing genetic and cultural heritages based on peoples’ features and clothes, I recognize that this distant cousin doesn’t look or dress like my grandmother’s family. I would love to know more about her. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled photo caption.)

3. My parents believed weasels were the chickens’ craftiest predators, blaming almost all egg, chick, and hen losses on an invisible and trackless family of mustelid carnivores, traceable only by scent. Years later, I realized that the scent I was taught to identify as “weasel” covered everything from the musk of a water snake to fox scat to mouse urine. (Click here to return to your regularly scheduled paragraph.)

Focusing on Mallards, Part II

Rae SpencerLeave a comment

Content warning: This blog post contains references to the hunting, agriculture, and research practices of killing birds. If you choose not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.

Part of my purpose in writing this Mallard series is to highlight the price that has been paid (and continues to be paid) for the knowledge we have about Mallards and other birds. I might have constructed these posts, as a younger writer, without acknowledging the deaths behind the data. But as I’ve aged, I’ve grown more aware of the cost of knowledge.

In this photo, the Mallard hen who inspired this series of blog posts swims with her brood of day-old ducklings in our dragonfly pond.
In this photo, the Mallard hen who inspired this series of blog posts swims with her brood of day-old ducklings in our dragonfly pond. The ducklings are gathered around a grassy seed head that the hen tugged down to within their reach. The hen nested in our neighbor’s yard, during spring 2024, and brought her brood to the dragonfly pond the morning after they hatched and again the next day. I wondered, during and after her long inactivity on the nest, if she experienced the kind of changes in muscle mass that I might experience if I spent most of a month in bed. I didn’t find a good answer for that question, but I found adjacent answers to adjacent questions. Enough adjacent questions and answers for this multi-part blog post.

What I mean by “knowledge”

It’s one thing, for me, to observe our yard and its visitors. To slip away from human concerns and simply watch. To sate myself with wonder. These hours shift my perspective. They build new connections between old memories. I sometimes emerge with splintered metaphors to sand and patch and paint. Sometimes with fine-grained phrases that liven up a drab idea. On the rarest and best days, I emerge with blueprints for new knowledge.

Observation and wonder are one thing. But knowledge is an entirely different state.

Separate and distinct from the metaphysical implications of knowing, my definition of knowledge is an inventory of education and experience. The nouns of my past and the context in which I encountered them, indexed by subject and era. A cross-referenced heap of biology, shuffled around the edges with chemistry. A shelf of style guides and writing advice. A few notebooks of math, physics, and cosmology. A faded box of recipes, crochet patterns, and needlework hints. Stacks of genre reading. Great aisles of emptiness where business, economics, and law failed to catch my interest.

I was recently asked to list my areas of expertise. I wanted to respond that I have none. I am a worksite traced with utility locator flags, not a finished library. I might claim my main parlor, biology, but even there the framework is incomplete. And, to align the metaphor with my theme, construction materials are expensive.

For many long decades I failed to appreciate the cost of knowledge, with its scaffolds of data. In this post, I’ve chosen to pull back the curtain I so blithely ignored as a young science student. Much of what I find behind that curtain forces me to stock those great empty aisles of business, economics, and law. Because the dimly-lit ledger of science history, written mostly by rich old white men, seldom accounts for cost. But every so often, jotted in the margins or tucked between the pages, the writers left remnants of their invoices.

In this photo, sleepy Mallard ducklings bask on a sun-warmed rock beside our dragonfly pond. One of the ducklings is yawning. From many perspectives, these ducklings are resources to be managed and controlled. For me, here in my middle years, these ducklings are downy singularities of wonder and charm far more valuable than mere resources.
In this photo, sleepy Mallard ducklings bask on a sun-warmed rock beside our dragonfly pond. One of the ducklings is yawning. From many perspectives, these ducklings are resources to be managed and controlled. For me, here in my middle years, these ducklings are downy singularities of wonder and charm far more valuable than mere resources.

The capitalism behind the curtain

During my brief foray in the humanities silo, I chafed over intense criticisms of science and science writing. But I couldn’t deny the foundational weakness. Science motored along for centuries, impervious to criticism, fueled by colonialism and capitalism. For the most part, it still does.

What would it look like, if science and science writing discarded the curtain and directly acknowledged the capitalism? The colonialism? Not just here and there, but in every published report? If the ledger was complete and brightly lit?

I don’t expect a humanities-approved (and strengthened) science literature would look like anything I can imagine. I am neither scientist nor science writer. What’s more, my little graduate certificate in professional writing is not a stamp of humanities approval. So I can’t answer the questions that followed me home from the humanities silo.

But I am an avid science consumer. As such, the word cost is not chosen lightly. Whenever I look behind the curtain of knowledge, no matter the era or discipline, I find the busy (and visible) hands of capitalism.

As ubiquitous as hunger, questions are free for anyone who has the energy and time to ask them. But answers? Answers are capital. They are expensive. And, weighed in the hands of capitalism, answers are expected to reap a profit.

What happens when answers are not synonymous with capital gain? When hunger lingers or multiplies because the investment outweighs the return? In very short order, the hands of capitalism divert resources and time toward less costly questions and more profitable answers. Or, at least, toward questions perceived to be less costly and answers anticipated to be more profitable. The question I should have been asking for years, the question I am asking now, is this: Whose perceptions and anticipations control the resources?

In this photo, a day-old duckling stretches upward to sample a mostly bald dandelion head. During their brief time in the yard, the ducklings stripped all the seeds from all the dandelions within several feet of the pond. I don't know if they ate the seeds or merely pulled them off as part of their exploration process
In this photo, a day-old duckling stretches upward to sample a mostly bald dandelion head. During their brief time in the yard, the ducklings stripped all the seeds from all the dandelions within several feet of the pond. I don’t know if they ate the seeds or merely pulled them off as part of their exploration process.

Some practicalities about Mallards and other waterfowl

Historically, Mallards had value (and have value, still) because they were and are hunted and farmed. When it comes to funding research, and to collecting data for research, hunted and farmed species are valuable, easy resources. “Valuable” in the capitalist sense of being actual capital, but also in the academic sense of data. “Easy” because these species live and die in larger, more accessible numbers than similar species that are neither hunted nor farmed.

Hunted waterfowl (and other game birds) live and die in their large numbers within easy reach of researchers. I can’t write a path around the pragmatism of this system, but I am increasingly uncomfortable with such pragmatism.

As capital, a Mallard’s value is tethered to its food and sport potential. Driven by this food and sport value, research funding adds further value to a Mallard. Each bird is data. Whether hunted, farmed, or recorded into a set of measurements, a Mallard’s value peaks with its death. (Perhaps this is true of every individual, of every species, but I’ll leave that notion for a later post.)

What of this spring’s next-yard hen, with her downy brood? When I perceive them as more than units of capital, when I anticipate their ongoing existence as more than a value that peaks when they die, my ability (and desire) to control them as resources wanes. For me, this feels like a good and useful adjustment of my perceived and anticipated place in the world.

The older I get, the less comfortable I am with capitalism and its pragmatisms. Far from being an agriculture, research, or policy pragmatist, I want the next-door hen and her offspring to have an embodied value separate from their muscle mass and plumage. I want empathy to count. My still and quiet moments in the yard. The silly antics of ducklings in a dragonfly pond. The charm of infant proportions and curious hungers. I want to measure value as a sense of shared life, a shared world, and shared safety or peril.

Photo of the next-yard Mallard hen sleeping at the edge of the dragonfly pond. She is asleep standing up, the equivalent of a duck cat-nap, beak tucked under the feathers of her wing. Her babies are nestled in her shadow, all except one duckling that has edged out onto the warm rocks in the warm sunlight.
Photo of the next-yard Mallard hen sleeping at the edge of the dragonfly pond. She is asleep standing up, the equivalent of a duck cat-nap, beak tucked under the feathers of her wing. Her babies are nestled in her shadow, all except one duckling that has edged out onto the warm rocks in the warm sunlight.

Aside: the literature’s euphemisms for “kill”

According to Google’s default dictionary, the word euphemism is derived from the Greek roots eu-, meaning “well”, and -phēmē, meaning “speaking”. I was taught, somewhere in my education, to translate euphemism as good word. But in my more recent years I have come to view euphemisms as veiled words. Intentional deflections. Syntactical high ground for writers (and researchers?) who wish to describe expanses of quicksand without getting mired. I sympathize with the impulse to build polite nomenclatures. To write around shock words and trauma words. But we’re all in the quicksand, no matter what we write.

(Remember the opening content warning? I do understand the need, the profound and pressing need, to protect victims of shock and trauma from experiencing further shock and trauma. This is why I embrace the practice of content warnings. The remainder of this blog post contains frequent references to the research, agriculture, and hunting practices of killing birds. If you choose not to read on, I respect and admire your choice.)

Policy, agriculture, and hunting literatures shy from the words kill and slaughter. “Kill” is rather imprecise, I suppose, for research literature. And “slaughter” is a bloody word, even with its Merriam-Webster finesse—“the butchering of livestock for meat”. In that sense, I acknowledge that “slaughter” is imprecise, as well. The birds (including Mallards) that populate policy, agriculture, and hunting literatures are resources. They are capital and data, not meat. Does it matter how we describe their deaths? (Yes! Of course it does.)

In the literatures, birds (including Mallards) are hunted, shot, collected, harvested, culled, sacrificed, and euthanized. Dead birds are examined, necropsied, and sampled. Wings are placed in the mail.

For this post and its subsequent parts (I’m not certain how many parts there will be), I’m choosing the word slaughter. Because I added up the numbers behind the data. The research numbers in the tiny subset of articles referenced here run into the thousands. The hunting numbers, hundreds of thousands per year. I feel the word slaughter fits.

The rest of my multi-part Mallard post draws heavily from work done by and for the research, agriculture, and hunting industries. Birds died for these questions and answers. For better or for worse, this is the world we have shaped for Mallards and their avian kin.

In this photo, a day-old Mallard duckling sleeps in a patch of clover and grass at the foot of one of the stones lining our dragonfly pond. The duckling is slumped forward, having nodded off after slipping down from the stone where most of its siblings were sleeping. Other siblings have slipped off of the stone, too, and are nodding off in a stair-step heap behind the sleeping duckling.
In this photo, a day-old Mallard duckling sleeps in a patch of clover and grass at the foot of one of the stones lining our dragonfly pond. The duckling is slumped forward, having nodded off after slipping down from the stone where most of its siblings were sleeping. Other siblings have slipped off of the stone, too, and are nodding off in a stair-step heap behind the sleeping duckling.

The research numbers

The following section, which deals with variations in the relative sizes of flight muscles, leans heavily on an article by D. C. Deeming, PhD.: “Allometry of the pectoral flight muscles in birds: Flight style is related to variability in the mass of the supracoracoideus muscle.” Deeming’s article pulled data from three primary sources: two tracts (1961 and 1962) from the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections and a 2016 survey out of Romania.

  1. Greenewalt, C. H. (1962). Dimensional relationships for flying animals. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 144(2).
    • Greenewalt collated pectoral muscle weights from a 1922 French publication: Magnan, A. (1922). Les caractéristiques des oiseaux suivant le mode de vol. Annales des sciences naturelles, Series 10, Volume 5, 125-334. (Yes, that is the same Antoine Magnan responsible for the urban legend that bees should be mathematically incapable of flight.) Magnan’s work used captive birds and, as Greenewalt cited, “…those which appear to be in bad health were discarded” (Greenewalt, 40). Some 228 birds, representing about 223 species, were slaughtered for this data. (I’m hedging my numbers because counting=math=possibility of error.)
  2. Hartman, Frank A. (1961). Locomotor mechanisms of birds. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 143(1).
    • Hartman’s tract drew from more ambitious work that took place in Florida, Maine, Ohio, and Panama. Birds were “collected” (or, even more euphemistically, “obtained”) from January to March, mostly before 11 AM (p. 3). The method of collection isn’t specified, nor the method of slaughter, though the authors specify that birds and their dissected muscles were weighed in “fresh condition” (p. 2). The pages and pages of data (pp. 38-91) represent more than 360 species. Individual numbers range from 1 (i.e., a solitary Bicolored Hawk of unknown sex and a single male Ruddy-capped Nightingale Thrush) to 50 or more (i.e., 55 House Sparrows, 51 White-breasted Nuthatches, 52 Rufous-tailed Hummingbirds, 50 Smooth-billed Anis, and 103 Brown Pelicans). In total, more than 6000 birds. (Again, hedging because math.)
  3. Vágási, C. I., Pap, P. L., Vincze, O., Osváth, G., Erritzøe, J., & Møller, A. P. (2016). Morphological adaptations to migration in birds. Evolutionary Biology 43, 48-59.
    • Vágási et al. captured and banded live birds in Romania, but also “[c]arcasses from natural deaths (e.g. road kill, building collision, electrocution, starvation) were collected in Romania and Denmark for taxidermy” (p. 50). The authors clarify, “Numerous bird specimens were brought frozen to JE, more than 95% of them being found dead and the remaining were shot by hunters” (p. 51). The dataset, here, includes some 115 species. Sample sizes ranged from single individuals (i.e., one Grey Wagtail , one Peregrine Falcon, and one Whinchat) to more than 100 (i.e., 824 House Sparrows, 228 Eurasian Blackbirds, and 193 Eurasian Sparrowhawks). In total, more than 3800 birds. (This article models a practical and effective approach to science without fresh slaughter, primarily sourcing data from carcasses submitted for the study. Granted, “natural deaths” from road kill, building collision, and electrocution are hardly “natural”, but I appreciate the distinction between carcass repurposing and the slaughter of otherwise healthy birds for research purposes.)

So Deeming gleaned data from more than 10,000 birds, without listing a single slaughter in the Materials and Methods section. This is both efficient science and inefficient communication. The actual numbers were curtained off, in at least one case, two sources deep and a century back. I applaud the reuse of data, but I resent the legwork required to find the birds within the data.

I expect that most of The Journal of Zoology‘s readers feel no need to find the birds. After all, the article’s intended audiences hold greater and deeper knowledge of birds, wings, and flight than I bring to the moment. The author and intended audiences would likely characterize my stroll down the numbers rabbit-hole as a tangent prompted by unrealistic purposes and fueled by OCD. But, was it?

What is the capital, here? Or rather, which capital is more valuable? The answers and knowledge, so satisfactory to my passing curiosity? The data and findings, so neatly packaged for future reference? Or the birds themselves, so fleetingly alive?

Ask a different me, in a different era, and my response to these questions would change. But, for now, my heart yearns toward the birds so fitted for flight as to seem almost magical, winging through yards and migrating over landscapes and dabbling with their downy chicks in dragonfly ponds.

In this photo, the Mallard hen reaches up to strip seeds from an overhanging, overgrown, and unknown species of grass that was growing around the foot of the dragonfly pond. The hen is floating in the pond surrounded by her day-old brood.
In this photo, the Mallard hen reaches up to strip seeds from an overhanging, overgrown, and unknown species of grass that was growing around the foot of the dragonfly pond. The hen is floating in the pond surrounded by her day-old brood.
Here, the Mallard hen has pulled the overhanging grass down toward her day-old ducklings. One of the ducklings is looking up from its place floating in front of her in the dragonfly pond, waiting for her to pull the grass low enough for the ducklings to sample the seeds.
Here, the Mallard hen has pulled the overhanging grass down toward her day-old ducklings. One of the ducklings is looking up from its place floating in front of her in the dragonfly pond, waiting for her to pull the grass low enough for the ducklings to sample the seeds.

Variation in the relative masses/sizes of flight muscles

(For specifics of flight muscle anatomy, see Part I of this post. In short, two muscles power bird flight: the large pectoralis muscle, which powers a wing’s downstroke, and the smaller supracoracoideus muscle, which powers a wing’s upstroke. Both muscles stretch across birds’ chests, from wing to sternum. If you eat poultry, these flight muscles are the breast meat.)

An average bird with average flying habits pushes down against air with its downstroke muscle, wing extended and feathers angled to maximize (or to finesse) the lift. How much force is needed depends on the birds’ weight and acceleration. Is it a heavy-bodied duck or a sleek-framed crow? At a minimum, the downstroke muscle is massive enough to lift the bird’s weight against gravity and accelerate according to the bird’s habits. Imagine the initial heaves of a Mallard taking flight. The lazy hop-launch of a crow. Which bird has bulkier downstroke muscles?

Back to the average bird with average flying habits, downstroke accomplished. Now it tucks and rotates its wings, to minimize air resistance for the upstroke.

Push (PUSH) down. Tuck. Pull (pull) up. Flap. Flap.

Large downstroke muscle, for the heavy work of lifting body weight against gravity. Much smaller upstroke muscle, lifting only the weight and feather-drag of tucked and rotated wings against air. Whether Mallard or crow, the upstroke muscle does less work. (Read on for exceptions, because there are always exceptions.)

In average birds with average wings, downstroke muscles are between 8 and 13 times larger than upstroke muscles (Deeming, “Discussion”, para. 1). So much pushing, so little pulling.

But what about not-average birds? What about birds with exceptional flight habits? What about flightless birds?

Some birds need to pull (PULL) as they raise their wings. They need a mightier upstroke muscle. Penguins, auks, and many other diving birds use their wings under water. No matter how much they tuck and rotate, water isn’t air. There’s more drag. These birds’ upstroke muscles are large, both in proportion to their downstroke muscles and in proportion to their body sizes. Their downstroke muscles are still the largest flight muscle, but only about 1 to 3 times larger than the upsized upstroke muscle. No more of those 8 and 13 numbers (Deeming, “Discussion”, para. 2).

Hummingbirds, which actually rotate and invert their wings during the upstroke, generate lift in both phases of the flap: push (PUSH) and pull (PULL). Surprisingly, to me, pigeons also generate lift in the upstroke, via a trick of the wing tip to change their wing shape. Both hummingbirds and pigeons measure in the same range as diving birds that swim with their wings; their downstroke muscles are only 1 to 3 times larger than their upstroke muscles (Deeming, “Discussion”, para. 2 & para. 5).

More special conditions occur for flightless birds, such as Rheas, and for owls and hawks. More special distributions of muscle. The Deeming article is packed with details.

I didn’t mean to write this much. But I’m fascinated. And I have OCD. It’s a dangerous combination, where tangents are concerned. But in the next part of this post, I’ll move on to flight muscle changes during a bird’s life cycle, as there is plenty of evidence regarding changes in flight muscle mass during molt.

Photo of a Mallard hen walking through the mown grass and weeds that make up our back yard. She is followed by her day-old brood of nine. Here, they were beginning their first stroll away from our tame-ish yard, toward the big waters running through our Tidewater area.
Photo of the Mallard hen walking through the mown grass and weeds that make up our back yard. She is followed by her day-old brood of nine. Here, they were beginning their first stroll away from our tame-ish yard, toward the big waters running through our Tidewater area.

Publication Announcement!

If you’re still here, I very much appreciate your time and attention. And, while I do feel a pang of irony as I promote my own writing while complaining about capitalism, my second poetry collection is now available!

Alchemy (Kelsay Books, 2024)

Photo of the front cover of Alchemy, which features trinkets and jewelry (many passed down from my mother) arranged on a cloth background. Each broach, bracelet, pendant, earring, and trinket illustrates a theme or topic from the poetry. Featured in the center, a Noah's ark pin and a globe-and-animals pin are connected by an antique miniature watch on a chain. Other items show mammals, birds, insects, fish, reptiles, amphibians, plants, and a fossilized seashell. Text on the cover reads "Alchemy, poems, Rae Spencer".
Photo of the front cover of Alchemy, which features trinkets and jewelry (many passed down from my mother) arranged on a cloth background. Each broach, bracelet, pendant, earring, and trinket illustrates a theme or topic from the poetry. Featured in the center, a Noah’s ark pin and a globe-and-animals pin are connected by an antique miniature watch on a chain. Other items show mammals, birds, insects, fish, reptiles, amphibians, plants, and a fossilized seashell. Text on the cover reads “Alchemy, poems, Rae Spencer”.

Alchemy is a different kind of collection than my previous Watershed. The poems in Alchemy are arranged in five sections after the style of academic articles: Introduction, Methodologies, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion. The poems celebrate my fascination with science and the history of science, but also express my yearning for the kind of metaphysical knowing I referenced earlier in this post. I hope readers feel their own celebrations and yearnings, as they read. Alchemy is available in paperback ($20) from Kelsay Books and in paperback ($20) or Kindle ebook ($9.99) from Amazon.

References

Deeming, D. C. (2023). Allometry of the pectoral flight muscles in birds: Flight style is related to variability in the mass of the supracoracoideus muscle. Journal of Zoology 319(4), 264-273. https://doi.org/10.1111/jzo.13043

Greenewalt, C. H. (1962). Dimensional relationships for flying animals. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections Vol 144(2).

Hartman, F. A. (1961). Locomotor mechanisms of birds. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections Vol 143(1).

Vágási, C. I., Pap, P. L., Vincze, O., Osváth, G., Erritzøe, J., & Møller, A. P. (2016). Morphological adaptations to migration in birds. Evolutionary Biology 43, 48-59. https://doi.1007/s11692-015-9349-0

Focusing on Mallards. Part I: The Flight Muscles

Rae Spencer2 Comments

While the yard didn’t have its very own Mallard nest, this year, we had regular visits from a hen who nested in the neighbor’s yard. Throughout April, the hen stopped in to graze and have a bath in the dragonfly pond. Then, on the morning of April 30, she brought along her brood of nine.

Photo of a Mallard hen standing beside our dragonfly pond. Almost hidden in her shadow are nine ducklings, huddled for a nap after a busy excursion in the pond.
Photo of a Mallard hen standing beside our dragonfly pond. Almost hidden in her shadow are nine ducklings, huddled for a nap after a busy excursion in the pond.
A Mallard hen (far right) swims with her nine ducklings in our dragonfly pond on April 30, 2024. The hen is mostly in shadow, her head in silhouette as she forages with her brood.
A Mallard hen (far right) swims with her nine ducklings in our dragonfly pond on April 30, 2024. The hen is mostly in shadow, her head in silhouette as she forages with her brood.

Where I started this multi-part post, and why

Spring often brings Mallards to our yard. March after March, April after April, May after May, pairs of Mallards wander in for a nap or a drink or a meal. Last spring, one pair stayed to nest. This year, there was the next-door nest.

Photo of three downy, day-old Mallards swimming in our dragonfly pond. One duckling faces the camera lens, a drop of water hanging under its bill. The light pink remnant of its egg tooth is visible.
Photo of three downy, day-old Mallards swimming in our dragonfly pond. One duckling faces the camera lens, a drop of water hanging under its bill. The light pink remnant of its egg tooth is visible.

Watching the next-door hen sit her nest day after day, watching her amble into our yard to bathe and eat, I wondered about her flight muscles. All told, with about a month on the nest and maybe two months more until her ducklings can fly, she’s grounded for three months. That’s a quarter of her year. What happens to her vital flight muscles during that time? Are stretching and flap-bathing enough to keep a Mallard’s muscles in flight condition?

As I’ve noted before, I can’t resist a bit of research…

Photo of the Mallard hen enjoying a vigorous bath in our dragonfly pond on April 30, 2024. Here, her head, chest, and wings are lifted out of the water as she flaps furiously against the surface, churning the water into sprays. One of her ducklings (far right) is just visible through the splashes.
Photo of the Mallard hen enjoying a vigorous bath in our dragonfly pond on April 30, 2024. Here, her head, chest, and wings are lifted out of the water as she flaps furiously against the surface, churning the water into sprays. One of her ducklings (far right) is just visible through the splashes.
Photo of the Mallard hen, still indulging in her vigorous bath. She has moved to the other end of the small pond as she continues to splash with her wings. A duckling watches from the foreground (lower left), safely anchored on the surrounding rocks.
Photo of the Mallard hen, still indulging in her vigorous bath. She has moved to the other end of the small pond as she continues to splash with her wings. A duckling watches from the foreground (lower left), safely anchored on the surrounding rocks.
Another photo of the Mallard hen, still bathing. Here she is leaning into her bath, wings clapping against the water hard enough to throw spray under her feathers.
Another photo of the Mallard hen, still bathing. Here she is leaning into her bath, wings clapping against the water hard enough to throw spray under her feathers.
Yet another photo of the Mallard hen, here nearing the end of her bath. She is standing tall in the water facing the camera, wings extended behind her, showing the white feathers on the underside of her wings.
Yet another photo of the Mallard hen, here nearing the end of her bath. She is standing tall in the water facing the camera, wings extended behind her, showing the white feathers on the underside of her wings.
Photo of the Mallard hen stretching her wings after enjoying a splashy bath. She is standing tall in the water, facing away from the camera, both wings at full extension. The tops of her wings are visible, complete with patches of deep blue feathers on each wing.
Photo of the Mallard hen stretching her wings after enjoying a splashy bath. She is standing tall in the water, facing away from the camera, both wings at full extension. The tops of her wings are visible, complete with patches of deep blue feathers on each wing.

I haven’t found any research into the changes (or lack of changes) in the flight muscles of nesting Mallard hens. That doesn’t mean this research isn’t out there. I simply haven’t found it. (I’m still searching.) But I did find a lot about flight muscles, and an article about flight muscle changes in molting, captive barnacle geese. (I’ll get to the geese in a later post.)

I’ll start with anatomy, because that always seems a reasonable place to start.

Unless you’re a duckling, then maybe start with the duck version of situational awareness. The world is a dangerous place for Mallards.

Photo of the Mallard hen teaching her ducklings to look overhead for danger. Whenever a crow or hawk flew over, she tilted one eye toward the sky (as seen in this photo) and gave a sharp quack. The ducklings froze in place, when they heard that quack, and they soon began to mimic her skywatching behavior.
Photo of the Mallard hen teaching her ducklings to look overhead for danger. Whenever a crow or hawk flew over, she tilted one eye toward the sky (as seen in this photo) and gave a sharp quack. The ducklings froze in place, when they heard that quack, and they soon began to mimic her skywatching behavior.
Photo of the Mallard hen teaching her ducklings to look overhead for danger. Here, one of the babies is copying its mother's tilt of head, one eye turned to the sky.
Photo of the Mallard hen teaching her ducklings to look overhead for danger. Here, one of the babies is copying its mother’s tilt of head, one eye turned to the sky.
Photo taken the next day, May 1, 2024, after the Mallard hen and her brood returned from spending their first night on the big water. They basked and bathed in our little water for one last calm day, but were not completely free of danger. Here, the hen has flattened herself in the grass at the pond's edge, her wide and wary eye skyward, while a Bald Eagle passed high overhead. This was her most extreme reaction, while I was watching, but it was the ducklings' least attentive response. A few of them glanced upward, but they didn't freeze in place. Instead they continued to fidget and stretch in preparation for a nap. I wondered if they couldn't see the eagle, as it was too high for my camera to find with autofocus.
Photo taken the next day, May 1, 2024, after the Mallard hen and her brood returned from spending their first night on the big water. They basked and bathed in our little water for one last calm day, but were not completely free of danger. Here, the hen has flattened herself in the grass at the pond’s edge, her wide and wary eye skyward, while a Bald Eagle passed high overhead. This was her most extreme reaction, while I was watching, but it was the ducklings’ least attentive response. A few of them glanced upward, but they didn’t freeze in place. Instead they continued to fidget and stretch in preparation for a nap. I wondered if they couldn’t see the eagle, as it was too high for my camera to find with autofocus.

Flight muscles in birds

Bird flight is powered by chest muscles. Each wing needs one muscle to raise the wing and another muscle to lower the wing. Two wings, two muscles per wing, four muscles in total. All in the chest.

Pretend your arms are wings. Now try mimicking flight. Can you feel your chest and back muscles moving? Now imagine you are a bird. All that flying, with only chest muscles at work.

Huh?

Birds have one upstroke muscle per wing…

Photo of the Mallard hen stretching her wings. In this photo, both wings are raised, meaning the upstroke muscles for each wing are contracting (shortening) while the downstroke muscles are relaxing (lengthening).
Photo of the Mallard hen stretching her wings. In this photo, both wings are raised, meaning the upstroke muscles are contracting (shortening) while the downstroke muscles are relaxing (lengthening).

…and one downstroke muscle per wing…

Photo of the Mallard hen, stretching her wings. Here she is shifting from a completed downstroke into an upstroke. The downstroke muscles are beginning to relax and lengthen, while the upstroke muscles are beginning to contract and shorten. Her wings and flight feathers are positioned to minimize air resistance on the upstroke.
Photo of the Mallard hen, stretching her wings. Here she is shifting from a completed downstroke into an upstroke. The downstroke muscles are beginning to relax and lengthen, while the upstroke muscles are beginning to contract and shorten. Her wings and flight feathers are positioned to minimize air resistance on the upstroke.

…groups of smaller muscles coordinate fine movements of flight feathers and joint angles, but power for flight lies in the muscles of the chest. The downstroke and upstroke muscles stretch, one on top of the other, between the sternum (the breastbone) and the humerus (the first and largest wing bone). One downstroke muscle and one upstroke muscle on the left side of the chest, for the left wing. One downstroke muscle and one upstroke muscle on the right side of the chest, for the right wing. If you eat poultry, these muscles are the breast meat.

Photo of the Mallard hen watching over her brood as they settle for a nap after an excursion in our dragonfly pond. I'm not here to preach against meat-eating, or against hunting. Both are part of the world, and both have been part of my world. But baby duck cuteness is part of why I am happier, here in my middle years, as a herbivore.
Photo of the Mallard hen watching over her brood as they settle for a nap after an excursion in our dragonfly pond. I’m not here to preach against meat-eating, or against hunting. Both are part of the world, and both have been part of my world. But baby duck cuteness is part of why I am happier, here in my middle years, as a herbivore.

Birds’ outermost chest muscles, the ones closest under the skin, are the downstroke muscles. They’re called the right and left pectoralis. They connect the sternum to the humerus on each side. When contracted, or shortened, these muscles pull the wings down. This anatomy is as straightforward as muscular anatomy gets. Sternum to humerus. When the muscles contract, they pull each humerus toward the sternum and the wings go down. A simple mechanism for a simple downstroke.

Flight anatomy gets its magic in the other flight muscles, the upstroke muscles. They’re called the right and left supracoracoideus. These muscles, nestled beneath the right and left pectoralis, also connect the sternum to humerus. But each upstroke muscle condenses into a tendon, as it nears its associated shoulder, and threads through a triosseal canal. A “three bone canal”. This canal lets each tendon emerge behind and over its associated shoulder, essentially passing from chest to back, before attaching to the top of the humerus.

This anatomical upstroke slight-of-hand, accomplished via the shoulder’s “three bone canal”, allows a pair of chest muscles to function like a pair of back muscles. When the upstroke muscles contract, or shorten, they pull the humerus away from the sternum so the wing goes up. An elegant mechanism for a simple upstroke.

Photo, from May 1, 2024, of the Mallard hen taking another vigorous bath in the dragonfly pond. Her ducklings (right foreground) bob on rough water and scatter to avoid being swamped as she churns up waves and spray with her strong wings. All of her wing power rests in her chest muscles.
Photo, from May 1, 2024, of the Mallard hen taking another vigorous bath in the dragonfly pond. Her ducklings (right foreground) bob on rough water and scatter to avoid being swamped as she churns up waves and spray with her strong wings. All of her wing power rests in her chest muscles.

If you think of a mechanical pulley system, the upstroke tendon would be the rope that runs over the wheel, while shoulder bones would be the wheel. Contracting, or shortening, the upstroke muscle is like pulling down on your end of the rope. The tendon slides over the bones, like the rope sliding over the wheel, and the wing (or the load you are lifting) rises up.

Presto.

The following video makes it much clearer (animation of the supracoracoideus and pectoralis starts at 3:59 and ends at 4:36).

Embedded YouTube video from medical illustrator Kelly Kage. A thesis video about the mechanics of bird flight, the video begins by describing skeletal anatomy, then moves into an animation of flight muscles at about three minutes and fifty seconds. Animation of the supracoracoideus and pectoralis begins at about 3:59 and ends about a minute later, at around 4:36. The entire video is nine-and-a-half minutes long. (I recommend the entire video, when you have time. The animations and narration are excellent.)

Bird flight isn’t exactly magic, but it’s mighty magical.

Why am I so fascinated?

An earlier version of myself, somewhere in my early twenties, taught a single semester of Introductory Zoology lab to undergraduates. (I was technically a graduate student at the time, but only because I needed two graduate courses to complete my prerequisites for veterinary school. I had no intention of finishing a Master’s degree.)

My most vivid memory, from my (thankfully) brief stint as a lab instructor, is the supracoracoideus exercise. I remember the uncanny slip of knowledge and knowing gliding across each other. The cognitive dissonance of trying to imagine a pair of flight muscles on my own chest.

Flex a chest muscle, and the wing goes down. Flex a different chest muscle, and the wing goes up.

Wing down. Wing up.

Chest. Chest.

Photo of a two-day old mallard duckling exercising its wing muscles. Here, with wings raised, the upstroke muscles in its chest are contracting while the downstroke muscles in its chest are relaxed. Photo taken May 1, 2024.
Photo of a two-day old mallard duckling exercising its wing muscles. Here, with wings raised, the upstroke muscles in its chest are contracting while the downstroke muscles in its chest are relaxed. Photo taken May 1, 2024.
Photo of a two-day-old Mallard duckling exercising its wing muscles. In this frame, the wings are early in the downstroke phase, meaning the little bird's downstroke muscles are beginning to contract while the upstroke muscles are beginning to relax.
Photo of a two-day-old Mallard duckling exercising its wing muscles. In this frame, the wings are early in the downstroke phase, meaning the little bird’s downstroke muscles are beginning to contract while the upstroke muscles are beginning to relax.

[Full disclosure: I was a bad teacher. I was both stupid and ignorant. I feared my human empathy, so I had conditioned myself to ignore the body language, verbal cues, and emotions of people around me. And I never thought to apply imagination to the teaching guide. I never thought to have my students move their own arms and feel their own muscles, then try to imagine the upstroke as a chest muscle, instead of a back muscle. As a tension through the shoulder while a tendon slides. If this post ever reaches any of my unfortunate students, I want to thank them for their patience and attention. They showed up, week after week. They showed up and they tried to learn what they needed, despite being burdened with an incompetent lab instructor. I know an apology is not enough. Even so, I’m sorry.]

Photo of a two-day-old Mallard duckling swimming in our dragonfly pond. The duckling is gazing at the camera lens from behind a rock. The facial markings of a Mallard duckling, with dark eye stripes over yellow down, make the babies look grumpy from this angle. I imagine my students felt grumpy, and likely overwhelmed, after each of my class sessions. I would have felt angry and betrayed, had I been my own student.
Photo of a two-day-old Mallard duckling swimming in our dragonfly pond. The duckling is gazing at the camera lens from behind a rock. The facial markings of a Mallard duckling, with dark eye stripes over yellow down, make the babies look grumpy from this angle. I imagine my students felt grumpy, and likely overwhelmed, after each of my class sessions. I would have felt angry and betrayed, had I been my own student.

The muscular choreography of bird flight is nothing like what I had imagined and mimicked, as a child. Not pushing my arms down with chest muscles and pulling them up with back muscles. Not a rowing cycle, over and over. Every time I pretended my arms were wings, my chest and back muscles cooperated. But for birds, it’s all chest. Chest muscles down and chest muscles up.

Photo of the Mallard hen with her brood scattered about her. In this photo, some of the ducklings are sleeping, some are fidgeting, and some are practicing preening. The hen is watching me and my camera with her head turned to one side, one eye focused directly on me. I can't help but imagine an internal monologue for her. "What is wrong with this human? Why is she so nosy? Should I be afraid?"
Photo of the Mallard hen with her brood scattered about her. In this photo, some of the ducklings are sleeping, some are fidgeting, and some are practicing preening. The hen is watching me and my camera with her head turned to one side, one eye focused directly on me. I can’t help but imagine an internal monologue for her. “What is wrong with this human? Why is she so nosy? Should I be afraid?”

Even today, despite my long familiarity with bird anatomy, I struggle to imagine how flight must feel. When I read about science fiction and fantasy creatures with wings, especially dragons, I usually forget to wonder about the musculature that powers fictional flight. But, in moments when I do pause to wonder, my imagination becomes richer.

A preview of Part II: More about Mallards and their flight muscles

So here is a duckling, with its clever wings and wing muscles, destined for flight. How it proceeds, how it uses those wings and wing muscles, determines how bulky the wing muscles must be. Or, do I have it backward? Do the wing muscles, with their relative bulks, determine how the duckling must use its wings? As with much, when it comes to physiology, the answer is a loop. The relative bulk of wing muscles influences how a duck might use its wings, and the ways a duck uses its wings influences the relative bulk of its muscles. Part II will have more about flight muscles, more about Mallards, and more photos of these ridiculously cute ducklings.

Photo of sleepy Mallard ducklings, one with a webbed foot stretched into the sunlight. If you are still reading, thank you.
Photo of sleepy Mallard ducklings, one with a webbed foot stretched into the sunlight. If you are still reading, thank you.

The following links lead to articles and posts that are more important and more interesting that my Mallard musings:

Alien life is no joke by Adam Frank at Aeon

No one buys books by Elle Griffin at The Elysian

Scalzi on film: The Godzilla Beeper by John Scalzi at Uncanny

Back in 2015, I knowingly blew up my life by Pamela Gray at Star Strider (hat tip to Science for Everyone)

What is it like to be a crab? by Kristin Andrews at Aeon

Moving beyond ontological (worldview) supremacy: Indigenous insights and a recovery guide for settler-colonial scientists by Coen Hird, Dominique M. David-Chavez, Shanny Spang Gion, and Vincent van Uitregt at Journal of Experimental Biology

Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19 by Martha Lincoln at Open Anthropological Research

In a New England pond, toxic algae is disrupting tribal heritage by Eve Zuckoff at CAI

The Unwild Mallards

Rae SpencerLeave a comment

Each spring, our semi-wild population of suburb mallards leave their lakes, ponds, and canals in search of private nesting habitats. This local migration often brings pairs of mallards to the yard, though none have stayed to nest. Until this year.

In this photo, taken April 29, five baby mallards huddle under their mother as she stands on a rock beside our pond. A sixth baby sits on the next rock over. These mallard ducklings were less than 18 hours out of the egg and are only half of the clutch. Six more babies were waiting in the nest behind their siblings.

Less than a week after I posted about the dragonfly pond, a pair of mallards arrived and began redecorating the pond. They shoved rocks from the border, collapsed minnow caves, uprooted plants, stirred sediment into columns of mud, and added enough nutrient (in the form of duck poop) to start a massive algae bloom.

In this photo, taken March 3, a pair of semi-wild mallards visit the pond. The male mallard floats near the center of the pond, preening his wings, while the female searches for underwater food. The water is still relatively clear and the pond‘s rocks and plants are still somewhat in place.
This photo, taken March 7, shows the view from our kitchen window as the mallards nap in the pond. Both ducks have their heads resting along their backs, beaks tucked into the feathers between their wings. The water is turbid and dark, with scattered remnants of uprooted plants. The rocks are still mostly in place, though that didn’t last.
Photo of the pond, taken March 14, showing filthy greenish-brown water. The pond heater is still deployed, though I removed it shortly after. A board shaped like a fish floats in the far end of the pond.1

The dragonfly pond soon looked and smelled like a cattle pond.

The ducks ate everything they could catch in the water. Minnows and dragonfly larvae, damselfly larvae and snails. Anything that swam or wriggled.2

We shooed and herded the pond-wrecking mallards, who returned day after day for further wreckage. I complained to family and friends about the mallards’ destructive invasion, but I also hoped for a nest. Truth be told, I always hope for nests. Plus, I have nostalgic affection for ducks.

This photo3 shows me at some early elementary school age, complete with crooked bangs, ill-fitting shorts and halter top, knobby knees, and a welter of mosquito bites. I’m holding our pet duck Fred, who was very spoiled.
This photo, dated 1975, shows a group of mature white ducks in our Tennessee back yard.
In this later photo, probably late 1980s, three white geese and two black-and-white ducks amble past a newly delivered cord of winter wood in our Tennessee yard.4
This photo, dating to the late 1980s or early 1990s, shows three white geese, two black-and-white ducks, and three white ducks visiting their blue plastic wading pool in our Tennessee back yard.5

Hoping to lure the mallards away from the pond for at least a few hours each day, I purchased a blue plastic wading pool (definitely a theme in my lifelong efforts to keep waterfowl happy) and an extra bag of wild bird feed. Pool and feed in hand, I set up a duck station near the fence in our Virginia back yard, including steps for easy entry into the pool. Then I herded the mallards out of the pond and toward the pool.

In this photo from March 12, a blue plastic wading pool is wedged into the back seat of my car. Many thanks to the very patient Target employee who brought the wading pool out for curbside pickup and helped load it while we both fought off fits of the giggles because who buys a wading pool in March? For ducks? While masking and social distancing because COVID is not over? (I’ll add that COVID is still not over. Especially for families, like mine, who have immunocompromised households.)

Not surprisingly, the mallards saw peril in the duck station and refused to try the wading pool. At that point, the pair were still semi-wild, after all. They retreated into the pollinator beds and rummaged through duff when I was in the yard, then circled back to the pond when I went inside.

And the pond grew more and more fetid. (I had almost forgotten the smell of our chicken house in Tennessee, and sometimes the yard when our flocks grew too populous, but now I’ve been reminded.)

In this photo from March 14, the male mallard watches warily from behind the irises that shore up one end of the pond. Neither of the mallards tried the wading pool until after I quit trying to convince them to try the wading pool.

When the female mallard built her nest in the irises and began laying, we stopped all efforts to shoo or herd or otherwise interfere. Almost immediately, the mallards took to the wading pool for luxurious sessions of bathing and splashing.

Photo from March 21, showing the female mallard bathing in the wading pool as the male mallard stands guard.
Photo, dated April 14, showing the female mallard bathing in the wading pool as the male mallard stands guard.
Photo, dated April 18, showing both mallards in the wading pool.

Resigned to a lengthy mallard residency, we invested in a pump and filter for the pond. For the next month, I cleaned the pond filter daily, dumped and refilled the wading pool every other day, put out feed each morning and evening, and lingered in the kitchen window for hours on end, watching. The mallards hunted in the pond (and further rearranged the rocks), bathed and basked in the wading pool, ate their feed and grazed through the yard, and generally unwilded until they were as comfortable in the yard as our domestic flocks had been in the yard of my childhood home.

And while the mallards unwilded, the nest grew.

Photo, dated March 20, of the nest with a single egg.
Photo, dated March 28, of the nest with five eggs.
Photo, dated April 1, of the nest with nine eggs.

On April 1, with nine eggs in the nest, the female mallard settled to incubating. Giving up all pretense of productivity, I sat in the kitchen window, day after day. While she sat on her nest. Day after day.

Photo, dated April 14, of the female mallard on her nest.
Photo, dated April 18, of the eggs nestled in layers of down.
Photo, dated April 18, of the female mallard on her nest.

And then, on April 28, the hatching commenced. All afternoon the mallard fidgeted and turned and tended, eating some of the discarded shells and membranes, tucking the rest under the nest’s foundation of dried grasses. By nightfall the nest was filled with ducklings instead of eggs.

In this photo, taken April 28, a freshly hatched mallard is nestled deep into the downy feathers lining the nest. The female mallard is half-standing in the nest, with two still-unhatched eggs visible beneath her.
Here a duckling, still damp from hatching, is just visible under the female mallard as she stands in her nest.
Here the ducklings are getting their first views of the world from inside their nest, still guarded by their mother.

I set my alarm for sunrise the next morning, certain that the female mallard would lead her brood away as soon as the hatchlings were mobile enough. I didn’t want to miss a moment of their brief stay in the yard.

April 29. The now-fluffy-and-dry baby mallards peer out from around their mother as the little family begins to stir in their nest.
The baby mallards follow their mother from the nest for their first outing. In this photo, two babies hover under their mother as she stands on the rocks just in front of the nest.
All twelve eggs hatched seemingly healthy babies. Their first clamber down the rocks was eager for some and timid for others. In this photo, one of the eager ducklings takes an awkwardly long step down from the first rock.
The eager duckling from the previous photo experiences a bit of a rough landing in the water. The impromptu dive didn’t phase the duckling, which swam busily away.
The more timid ducklings took more care climbing down from the nest. In this photo, a group of three ducklings linger on the first rock as one of their siblings stretches a careful foot down toward the next step.
The ducklings tasted everything they found. Here, a baby mallard floats on the pond and nibbles at a long plant stem.
The fish-shaped board proved a popular resting spot for the ducklings as they practiced swimming and diving and eating. Here, two ducklings perch on the board while their siblings swim around them. The female mallard is just visible in frame, keeping an eye on her brood.
The ducklings also rested on the pond’s bordering rocks, which were warm from the sun. Here, four ducklings sit on the warm rocks.
A baby mallard, less than 24 hours out of the egg, perches on one of the warm rocks bordering our small dragonfly pond.
Exhausted after their first few swim lessons, the mallard family returned to their nest between adventures. Here, two of the babies have tipped over into awkward sleeping positions on the rocks while their siblings gather in the nest beneath the female mallard.

And, of course, they didn’t stay.

I followed the mallards as their mother led them out of the yard and down our street and through a playground and up the next street over to a house on a canal without a fenced back yard. The homeowner was working in his yard when our odd parade arrived, and he nodded and shrugged when I waved from the sidewalk across the street. He told me that mallard mothers lead their brood through his yard, the only unfenced yard along the canal, all spring long. They head for the canal despite its dangerous populations of snapping turtles, snakes, and bullfrogs large enough to eat a baby duck. We agreed that yards are safer but mallards need canals.

Then I trudged home alone, wishing for a world both more and less wild.

I was shocked when the mallard led her brood back, that evening. My husband saw them coming up the sidewalk and called for me. The female mallard had guided her dozen day-old ducklings out into the canal and back again, safe and tired. We opened the gate and welcomed them home, pond wreckage forever forgiven as the sleepy family spilled back into their nest.

The next morning they left for good, of course. The yard, for all of its unwild safety, is not meant for mallards. Nor are mallards meant for the yard.

They haven’t returned, and they won’t. At least, not as the same little family that left. But every mallard I see, for all my years to come, will be one of them.

The Unwild Mallards

The unwild mallards were stubborn and messy
Unwily in their need
And the pond was water enough for nesting

An unwild nest
In unwild irises

A quick meal and a bath
Then back to the nest

Days growing longer and hotter
In the unwild yard
With unwild waters

And then
The unwild dozen

That afternoon, they left
Then returned for one last night
Before they left for good

Heading toward the good wild waters
Where unwild mallards might learn
To be wild
Video comprised of still images and iPhone video clips of the mallards’ time in the yard. Text over the images repeats the poem printed above. The audio is a separate recording made in the yard as I edited this video. Traffic noise and wind dominate the audio, but crows and a blue jay make guest appearances.

Footnotes

1 We added the board after removing a commercial floating planter/island. We removed the island because it was ruined, then added the board because we felt sorry for the minnows that had enjoyed hanging out under the island. (Click here to go back.)

2 The ducks were not so efficient as to depopulate the minnows and invertebrates. I’m not certain how anything survived, between the feasting and the fouling, but some survived and carried on. Currently, the pond is teeming with baby minnows and every surface is clumped with snail eggs. (Click here to go back.)

3 This is another of my oldest sister’s “Rae with pets” series of photos, which span years and will likely continue to appear on this blog. In the background, two chickens and our shepherd make guest appearances. (Click here to go back.)

4 After our father left, the job of stacking wood fell to me. Mother purchased cut wood from a neighbor, who unloaded it in a heap. I would sort the wood by size and age, stacking it all in our pole shed. The freshest cuts went at the bottom of the pile (to age/cure) and the aged/cured wood at the top. The largest logs started at the left and the smallest kindling at the right. I even sorted the wood according to Mother’s lore: she believed that the hardest woods (usually hickory and oak) burned long and hot, the softer woods (often maple and hackberry, but sometimes others that I didn’t recognize) burned fast and cool, and the evergreens (pines and the occasional cedar) burned oily and deposited more creosote in the chimney. When bad weather was forecast, I brought days or weeks worth of wood to the porch, where it stayed drier than the shed. But Mother didn’t like keeping wood stacked on the porch because warm air escaping through the door woke the woodpile’s insects, who followed the warm air indoors. (I never had cause to doubt Mother’s wood fire lore and would likely stack wood by size and hardness, away from the porch, if we burned wood for heat today.) (Click here to go back.)

5 The wading pool was the closest thing they had to a pond. A second blue plastic wading pool, visible in the background, was in the dog pen and helped our dogs stay cool. The second pool also kept the dogs from digging under the fence because they wanted to play in water. (Click here to go back.)

I regret that I do not have a list of links, for this post, to articles and essays that are more important and more interesting than the small unfoldings in our small yard. I have been tired, of late, and taking a break from the larger world. I will resume reading and exploring and learning once I have regathered my energy, both emotional and physical. In the meantime, please post links of your own, to articles and essays that have helped you better understand the world. (Please also note that I screen comments.)

The Rest of the Wren Story

Rae Spencer10 Comments

In June of 2015, I noticed that one of the yard’s House Wrens had begun feeding a family of Northern Cardinal nestlings. (Read my initial blog post here.)

Nestling May 30

The adult cardinals, especially the male, were also feeding the nestlings.

Nestling May 31

In that early blog post I wrote, “I wonder if this kind of behavior is common. Have the yard’s birds been feeding each other all along?”

Cardinal May 11

In searching for answers to my question, I ran across the Tough Little Birds blog, run by biologist Katie LaBarbera. I contacted her through the blog, and she replied that the behavior was unusual enough to be of interest to other biologists. Before too long we had a short article ready to submit for publication. After peer review and a few revisions, the article was accepted by The Wilson Journal of Ornithology and can be found in the current (September 2016) issue: House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) provisions nestlings of Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis).

And now, as Paul Harvey might have said, it’s time to post the rest of the story…

wren-june-4

Back in June of 2015, while I was searching for answers online, the wrens’ brood hatched. For a few days the male wren stayed busy feeding both nests, dividing his time somewhat unequally in favor of the young cardinals. But something changed as the cardinals neared fledging. The last time I saw the cardinal nestlings accept food from the wren was on June 5th, and the last time I saw him approach their nest was on June 6th. (They greeted his visits on the 6th with silence.) On June 7th, the young cardinals left their nest.

cardinal-june-7

The yard stayed in a turmoil on the 7th, loud with the cries of hungry cardinal fledglings and nervous cardinal parents. (The male cardinal was particularly aggressive with larger birds that day, much to the dismay of a hungry brown thrasher.)

cardinal-june-7

cardinal-june-7

The wren, formerly so devoted to the cardinal nestlings, never approached the cardinals after they fledged. Instead he spent the 7th, and the following days, feeding his own nestlings. The young wrens stayed in their nest box until June 16th and 17th, eating spiders and praying mantises and a variety of other insects brought by their parents.

wren-june-10

wren-june-10

wren-june-10

wren-june-11

wren-june-12

The nestlings grew bigger and bolder each day.

wren-june-13

wren-june-13

And their parents worked harder and harder to keep them fed.

wren-june-16

By June 16th they showed signs of leaving.

wren-june-16

wren-june-16

And on June 17th …

wren-june-17

They were out of the nest box, but they were still hungry!

wren-june-17

wren-june-17

wren-june-17

When they left the yard that evening, I felt bereft. As I always do when the yard’s children move on.

wren-june-17

I wished, as I always do, to follow the fledglings. Or at least to know their futures. Did any of them survive? Have they, perhaps, visited the yard again in the weeks and months since?

wren-june-17

Let me know if you see them.