Nesting season

Just around the corner from our house, on someone's front lawn, a pair of spur wing plovers have decided to build a nest. The home owners have carefully fenced off the nest area with a little wooden frame while the mother bird is sitting on them. A father bird hangs around protectively nearby.

This is really interesting to observe as we drive past in the car, usually at least a couple of times every day. Over the weekend the people who live in the house mowed the lawn all around the edge of the frame leaving the nest undisturbed. Sometimes I've driven past and seen the mother bird standing up near the nest, and I counted at least two eggs.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when the eggs hatch. My prior knowledge and experience of these birds is that they would nest on the large expanse of oval at my primary school and then become highly protective of their young and highly aggressive towards anyone who was unfortunate enough to get too close to them.

So I'm not sure I would want to actually be living in the house when the chicks hatch out of the eggs. Regular drive pasts will probably be a far safer option.

And while I'm on the subject of nesting, our ducks are making a comeback. We are now chasing one, sometimes two, adult ducks out of the pool again. I think it's only a matter of time before we're calling the wildlife carers to take the next bunch of ducklings away.

Unwelcome visitors

These turned up in our backyard yesterday. This is the third time this has happened in the past year. A duck has decided that our backyard and pool are the perfect nesting venue for his wife (wives?) and children.

It was cute the first time. Now it's just annoying. They pollute our pool and nothing we have tried to get rid of them has worked. We now have to consider more expensive solutions, like a pool blanket or a dog. Pros and cons with both of these.

So yesterday I called the wildlife rescuers yet again to come and take them away. The ducklings aren't so hard to catch. The mother duck is a different story. She gets very aggressive when cornered. The father duck has usually disappeared from the scene by the time the babies arrive so he doesn't ever get caught.

I asked the guy who came around whether these ducks (Pacific black ducks for anyone who's interested) mate for life. He thought they did. So either the male is finding the female again when they get relocated or he is just shacking up with someone new each time. I asked him if he would take them a long way away to see if that works. He gestured vaguely over his shoulder and said "I'll just take them over the back here."

My bet is that we'll have more of them by Christmas.