On of the great things about sitting down by the river is that it's always there. You can go away for a funeral, or a month in China, and the river and the birds don't know a thing about that. They just keep going on with their rivery, birdy lives. Your leaving made no impact and neither does your coming back.

You'll get the story of Zayde and the Chinese shoes, and the story of Uncle Bobby's FBI warrant, later on. But right now I'm happy to report that one of the things my comings and goings have had no impact on is the Gadwall population. Gadwalls are ducks very like mallards, but slightly smaller and a lot less pushy. This means that they like to nest in the same sorts of places, but the mallards grab up all the good spots. The Gadwalls on this stretch of river have developed a quiet strategy to deal with this, though: they just wait. Once the mallard ducklings have hatched the mallards abandon the nesting spots and the Gadwalls move in. So now we have at least 2, and I say 4, new broods of Gadwalls. There's one brood of 5, and according to Urban Naturalist, one of 7. But I've seen 2 broods of 8. U.N. swears they were the same brood, and probably he counted wrong about the 7, so all in all there are only 2 broods. We are NOT, he says, up to our ankles in Gadwalls. But I think otherwise. Or, I want to think otherwise. One of these Gadwalls nested in the high grass behind my bench, which is right near the roadway. I was sure the eggs weren't going to make it, and I thought the female was going to get killed besides. So now I really want to believe they did make it, and as many of the other pairs made it as possible. So I'm planning on believing in my 4 new duckling broods until absolutely proved wrong. Which I'm not sure how I could be, now that I think bout it.

And we have laughing gulls, too.