Surprise!

Hello everyone!

I hope you have all had a lovely surprise in the last few days.  However, I bet few of you can have had the sort of surprise we had on Monday evening.

I was down in the vegetable garden and heard peeping.  Turned around and saw some fluttering of potato plant leaves.  Turned away.

Heard peeping. Turned around again and saw something yellow move along the ground.  Weird.

Walked over.  Didn't see anything.

Waited.  Heard peeping.

Out walked a duckling!

Shook head.  Rubbed eyes.  Shook head.

Duckling walked away from me and under a red current bush, which is hard by the raspberry patch ... which has been rather surrounded by the Jerusalem artichokes which are being overtaken by hops.

I've been meaning for weeks to get in there and do some thinning out of plants.

Thank goodness I didn't!

Spot - I named him Spot because of the brown mark on his beautiful little head - came back out, peeping.  Other peeping sounds called after him from the overgrown plants.

You can bet I went dashing into the house to get Chris and son Dylan to come see.

And by the time we came out Spot was gone.

The wonderful thing is that he came back and did a lot of wandering about over the next two hours before dark.  If anything, he kept going so far afield that I was getting worried.  He came right out into the path - 4 metres from home base ... wandered back towards the peeping.  He wandered beyond the path - 8 metres ... and finally back home towards the peeping.  He wandered all the way over to the cut back (a work space) which is 15 metres from home base!  And, with a bit of Chris walking behind him in the direction of home, he finally went back into the currents and raspberries, and the peeping of brother and sister ducklings we never did see.

Well, we talked and worried over the evening.  Our house is three blocks and a 4 lane road from the Thames River!  And even if Mama (who we hadn't even seen yet) decided to take the babies west instead to the creek - 3 blocks the other way - we weren't at all sure if there was any water this dry spring.  And we headed to bed.

8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning there wasn't a sound.  No peeping.  No Spot.

Chris headed for the computer - google search - and found out that within hours of ducklings being hatched the parents walk them off to the nearest water source.

So, they were gone.

And we've decided that the best ending to the story is that they all reached water safely and are getting bigger and stronger every day.  Especially Spot.

Best regards,

Why's Woman