Our Outdoors: A Parade of Progeny
By Nick Simonson
There was almost an air of concern in my mom’s voice as I wandered back in from my morning stroll to the end of the dock to watch the sunrise and inspect the shallows. A few quick casts of the neon green fly line sporting a beadhead pheasant tail nymph connected with a handful of small bluegills, but before long it was time to refill my coffee cup, walk the dog and get on with the day.
“Have you seen the ducklings yet,” she inquired from her early morning post at the table on the wooden deck, adding “I’ve seen the hen but no babies so far.”
I assured her that my wife and I had seen a set of nine baby mallards in tow behind the beige bird shortly after our arrival at the cabin for the holiday weekend and that they’d likely be along soon as the morning got moving. Through the whisk and snap of the screen door, I went in and refilled my cup, leashed my mom’s lab, and headed out the back way, the first morning calls from a cardinal greeting us as we hit the blacktop and began our trek through the nearby neighborhood on the south side of the lake. At the first intersection, a whitetail doe and her fawn caught sight of us and were quickly into the woods without so much as a twig snapping.
Squirrels of all shades, including a couple of the areas notable black hued ones were foraging. Chipmunks skittered amidst the leaf litter, and red squirrels chattered out a warning as we traversed the paved edge of their territory. Wrapping up where we started, a pair of boisterous crows cawed loudly, and their developing young gave a half-hearted response from their concealed position somewhere in the trees along the house. The heat and humidity of the first day of July was building already and a seat near the water was a welcome end to the walk as the sun started to rise through the trees.
No sooner did I make my way out to the front deck when the hen mallard appeared with her young, about a third of the way grown so far, swimming along the sandy shoreline. Alerting my mom, we watched as the birds drifted under the dock and out of view. The sighting seemed to bring for her a sense of relief that indeed the natural world was proceeding as planned this season, and that likely with nine babies under her care, a good crop of ducks would be coming up.
A few moments later, about 10 yards further out, a pair of Canada geese guided their four offspring along, this time out and around the end of the dock. While they’re certainly not rare on our side of the lake, with its development, dogs and all sorts of water activity throughout the summer, we usually only see them in the early stretches of the day, when things are calmer, and they were likely right on the edge of that window, adding a welcome surprise to the tally of young birds we were quickly putting together. But the next set of visitors would blow them all away in terms of count and uniqueness.
Like a floating carpet of black and white, led by an extended reddish-brown head, a group of more than 20 puffballs came floating in just moments after the geese had passed, as if on cue for some sort of grand entrance. Unable to clearly figure out what kind of mother was leading this set of young – which I had never seen before on our shores, perhaps a function of timing in the past or seasonal shifts this year – I picked up my phone and reluctantly unlocked the screen to get a digital field guide in front of me. It was a common merganser, and by the time I had identified the piscivorous water bird, the lot of youngsters and their mother had taken a spot occupying about half the length of the foam swimming pad attached to our dock.
We watched in silence as the little ones waddled about, sat down, dried off and the mother bird preened from her spot between the babies and the shoreline, a certain display that across the board baby birds were exactly where they were supposed to be this season. It was if in the last 15 minutes of early morning, before the first water skiers, wakeboarders and jetski pilots got up and on the lake that all of the birds in residence – some common and some less familiar –knew it was their time for a parade of their progeny and a showcase of the generation to come…in our outdoors.
