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Esme's brother lives at Ballajura in Perth. His
house backs on to an ornamental lake area that was part of the development. The
lake has open grassy areas on a couple of sides and housing to its edge on the
others.
A little while ago a pair of Shelducks made an
appearance at the lake, together with 5 small ducklings. These are wild birds
and presumably they bred on the lake shore somewhere, although Esme's brother
didn't ever see them sitting. The ducklings are growing up and are now moulting
into "normal" plumage. As you can see from the below photo, one of them isn't a
Shelduck. It is a Wood Duck!
I thought this was interesting enough to post
here - I haven't heard of this sort of thing before although I presume it
can happen, especially if a very young duckling got separated from its parents
and managed to "tag on" to another group of ducklings of a different species and
then imprinted on the parents of those ducklings. I suppose its also possible
that the Shelducks actually incorporated a Wood Duck egg into their own clutch
and then successfully incubated it but I'm rather inclined to think that this is
less likely than the "tagged on" explanation. Esme's brother didn't notice any
Wood Ducks with any ducklings at any stage - this "imposter" has been with the
Shelducks right from the small duckling stage.
Bruce
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