So we have a pond at our house.  There are cat-tails surrounding some of it and in the summer, the frogs love to keep us up at night by croaking.  There are moderately sized green frogs and then the large bullfrogs.  We have a blue herron who comes around and eats the frogs so this is a good thing.  There are large carp in this pond–they’re about two feet long.  Then we have lots of blue gills and other fish.  I don’t know what they are.  Doves fly in at dusk to get drinks.  We have quail (about 18 of them) who run by quickly to search for seeds along the shore.  But the most prominent birds on the pond are the ducks.

I’m no camera genius, but this was a sunrise one morning with the ducks on our pond with the sun coming up through the weeping willows.  We have about fifty ducks a day who hang out at our house.  For a while, five geese showed up.  Our ducks are mostly Mallards, but now we have one American Coot (it looks like a duck, but it’s not) and eight Baldpates aka Widgeons. 

I absolutely love this duck–a baldpate.  The coloring on its head is amazing.  I like these fifty-plus ducks so much, I started feeding them cracked corn.  They go nuts for it.  Now when they see me, they come waddling out of the pond and are practically tame.  The other morning, it snowed and when I went outside, this was the sight that greeted me.  

While this is all great, and it’s fun to be able to stand there and feed them while they are mere inches away, there is the downside . . . they now think our swimming pool is better than the pond.  This doesn’t make my husband too happy.  But you have to admit, this is one cool photo!