Just Ducky

It's the same ducks. It has to be. They arrive back here in the spring, and almost right away, Mom Duck shows up at the stable to chat up

the chickens and invite herself for lunch. She flies directly to the stable, and walks up to the entranceway as boldly as if she lived here. Which, in a sense, she does.

The chickens tolerate her. Interestingly, they are less tolerant of her mate, resplendent as he is in his full plumage. The vivid colours in the drake's feathers is mostly a trick of the light. While pigmentation melanins and carotenoids can provide colours for bird plumage, the blues, greens and other iridescent variations arise from the physical presence of minute structures on the surface of the feathers which reflect only one wavelength of light. It's like having tiny little prisms on the feathers -- sometimes a tiny crystal, sometimes the presence of strategic tiny air bubbles within the

feather itself. This gives the drake his iridescent green head, and it gives the bluejays their striking blue. If you hold one of their brightly coloured feathers up to the light (after they are done with the feather, of course...), the top of the feather will gleam and flash with colour, but if you turn it over, the feather will appear gray, because the underside doesn't refract the light the same way.

He's very dashing, our drake, and let us get a close-up of his pin-tail feathers!

Thanks to Mike Hodgon we have a lovely photo that really gives you a sense of the stunningly vivid colours our drake is currently wearing.

While Mom duck is busy chatting up the chickens -- which she truly does, her little beak clacking away as she tries to infiltrate their ranks and get to the grain, the drake stays off to the side. If he comes too close, the chickens chase him away, but he won't leave his gal, so he hangs out on the edges, looking cool. The chickens seem quite envious that when the ducks are finished schmoozing, they simply fly away.