After a slow start to the day, because everyone was quite tired, we’d lost an hour due to the clock change, and H and I (for different reasons) were somewhat under the weather, we got ourselves together and went off to Stratford for a walk. It promptly started raining at this point, which was at least preferable to the hail and sleet storm we had to endure yesterday, but still pretty unenticing, so we rapidly changed direction and went for coffee instead.
After three quarters of an hour in BTP, where R and I ate cake and the younger generation snacked on chips, we decided that we really did need to get some exercise, so we headed off to the river. It wasn’t actually raining any longer, but it was still a pretty miserable day, so we did the shortest riverbank walk we could reasonably justify and then headed home for lunch.
Of the precisely two male Mallards I found to photograph during this odyssey, I’ve chosen this one because his aberrant plumage makes him slightly more interesting than his colleague. Mallards are well known for being able to hybridise with other species of ducks, but in this case I think the cross – possibly several generations back by now – was most likely with a feral domestic duck, which were bred from Mallards in the first place. There’s more discussion about the potential problem of the Mallard’s genetic variability and its capacity to “pollute” the gene pool of other species, in this Wiki.
R: L2, C7, D10.
