Our Ducks

We go to the park everyday and walk around the duck pond. We have gotten to know the different duck families, where they like to swim, look for food, who they fight with, etc. I took pictures of all of "our" ducks, all except the Chinese ducks. Not sure why we call them that.

Here is the mallard family. They mostly keep to themselves in the really mucky end of the pond.
These are geese. Oddly enough they are Chinese geese, but these are not the ducks we refer to as the Chinese ducks. They are very noisy and the big white male can get pretty nasty if any other males get too close his women folk. Two members of this family flew away a few weeks ago and never came back.


Here is the pom-pom duck family. Named for that one unfortunate duck that seems to have a cotton ball glued to her head.

These are the white ducks, obviously. They are the ones most likely to come and eat your bread crumbs. They are also the ones most likely to mess with the big goose's women.
And finally our favorite, the Funny Duck family. It is made up of what appears to be two gorgeous females in dark hues, one white male duck that leads the pack and Funny Duck. Funny Duck is quite homely with perpetually messed up feathers in a hodge podge of colors, a crazy red face, a bum leg, a neck spasm and a butt that never stops wagging. He is the least graceful duck I have ever seen, on land and on water. But he works really hard to keep up with what we have to assume is his adopted family.

In the upper pond, there is a whole family of funny ducks with much less personality that has one mallard in their group. Jonathan hypothesizes that at some point these duck families were feuding and in an effort to stop the fighting, the patriarchs swapped sons. Apparently, this a popular comic book plot device. Here is a video of our Funny Duck so you can get the whole Funny Duck Experience.