A Wood Duck Day

I went birding at Minto-Brown Island Park today.  It’s a huge Salem city park of almost nine hundred acres, so you have to kind of pick an area to cover.  In this case I parked at parking lot number four and made a big loop around a large slough. Wood Ducks were the item of the day; all told with four different groups I counted seventeen.  This mother was the first one I spotted trying to round up her five fleeing ducklings. The second group I spotted involved a mother having a show down on a log with a turtle. The third group was a rather unusual scene, a mother with five large juveniles being accompanied by a male Mallard. Male Wood Ducks do not hang around to help raise the young, but male Mallards often do, so my take on the situation was that the male Mallard had kind of adopted the Wood Duck family. The forth group was made up on two females and one male, the only male Wood Duck of the day. On the way back to the car I noticed the mother had her family all back together.