…in our yard! Since we moved here about 2.5 years ago, we have periodically seen Mallards flying overhead, often in the evening, presumably going between open water areas, which are few now. Sometimes we’ve seen them a few blocks away descending into someone’s yard and disappearing behind a fence and taking off again. Never, until yesterday, had they landed in our yard. I’m sure the cracked corn that I threw on the ground since the last snow might have been visible as they flew over. In any case, about 9 pm last night there were 17 Mallards wandering down our shoveled paths, eating fallen birdseed and some of the cracked corn. Most of them stayed around until it was nearly dark, about 45 minutes. Today they arrived about 1:45 pm, 15 of them and stayed about 1/2 an hour waddling over the snow, sliding down the snow banks, eating, eating, and being perching birds for a while. I expect they will be back. We had Mallard pets as kids and I have a soft spot for them, but I will probably live to regret it if we get 100 of them in our yard. We shall see.
On the much smaller side, for the second day I was able to feed a Common Redpoll on my hand. In fact, they were landing on my hand, up to three at a time, and chasing each other away for a while this morning. No pictures yet.
Note: for some reason two copies of one of the duck videos were inserted in this blog post and they are impossible to remove or edit. Sorry.
Lynn Barber's Birding Blog 