Duck!

Several mornings ago I, when I was at the Greencastle, Pennsylvania Con-Way yard, I woke up to this loud chattering and various goings-on outside my cab. I'm a fairly deep sleeper and normally truck stop noises don't bother, so I was curious what was happening. I poked my head out the driver door and saw the root cause of the ruckus:

View all Duck! pics

Yes, two large bunches of ducks doing duck things in a pond that Con-Way keeps at the back of their property. They were squawking at each other, preening and basically causing a commotion.

Eventually one group flew off to bigger and better pastures (ponds?):



I was at a pretty high zoom level with my Nikon and holding down the capture button as I turned from right to left so there is some motion blur in most of these photos and you don't see all the birds that took off (there were probably two dozen in that group).

Eventually the remaining adult ducks split, and about ten minutes later one of the groups came back in for a landing:





I didn't realize it but there were a handful of baby ducklings in the pond as well -- their coloration makes them damn good hiders in a duck pond! Can you pick them out of this photo? (HINT: look at the center of the photo at the edge of the water)



Do you have all your ducks in a row?