.... for the short time Annie, Eleanor and Ollie were here, and now that the Olympics are finished - weren't they wonderful! - it's high time I put in a few of the photos Ell and Annie took of the ducks.
On Thursday we were enjoying a cup of coffee just outside of the sunlounge when we heard very quiet little quack quack quack sounds coming from under the Budleija on the left of us near the house wall:
I had noticed that Bless was missing from her group of 13, and sure enough, a little later she appeared from under there and got a noisy reception from the others.
We did find an egg in the little nest she'd made near the wall, but it was already cold. So either she'd laid it there the day before or it took her a long time to come out from under the shrub because she was scared of Ollie who had been lying on the terrace in the sun:
Ollie was ever so good the three days he was here, didn't make the slightest attempt to go near the ducks and they soon realized there was no danger from him and puddled around as normal.
Annie went round the corner to avoid the hot sun and sat near the fish pond to do some painting. She took these shots of the ducks as they came looking for snails and slugs behind the pond:
Look who's hiding at the back behind the Alchemilla --- Purdy!
But her friend Honey was very
close by, and by the time the other 11
came back to the front of the house
the two of them were already settled
at the edge of the terrace:
Eleanor made up a whole gallery of ducky pictures from all three groups and trying to give them all the right names... but I'm having trouble myself with the new lot! For instance, the one that hatched second which I was going to call Velvet doesn't look like velvet at all now. I used to be able to distinguish between them as they differed so much in size, but they are now all as big as, or bigger than, Gertie and Billie Jean. At the moment I can only tell the youngest ones apart by the baby fluff at the backs of their heads:
In this picture I could number them easily in the order they hatched over an 11-day period, and as you can see there were 5 dark ones and 4 light ones. Now in the photo below the little chap standing in front of the red bowl just has to have started life as a bundle of yellow fluff because I can see the 5 dark ones and he's got to be one of the 4 light ones .......
.... but how can he have changed from this to this?:
Mind you, looking back at this picture the change to darker head colours is already visible:
Now back to some of the lovely shots Eleanor took:
Ell also took lots of photographs of the other groups, like this one of Jay-Z and 4 of the "new girls",
and one I particularly liked this one [because of the light effects] of a cow the other side of our fence:
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