Or at least, fertile water birds! In addition to the three Canada goose pairs with nine goslings among them, and the Brant pair with four, and the brown, meaning juvenile, herring gulls, I saw this morning a young cormorant, still pale-feathered, and a female mallard trailed by a dozen ducklings! They can't all be hers, but ducks babysit, so another female could have left a bunch with her and flown off someplace. Or, not to shine quite such a sunny light on it, something might have gotten the other mother and this one adopted the babies. They're all exactly the same size. She took them on a long swim, a mile down the river and back up again, and made sure to stop and collect them all occasionally when the straight line they were swimming in got messed up by waves. When she got to a cove close to where they nest she was met by three males. Two of them swam over quacking, and she quacked back. After that, one of the males stayed with her and the duckling when she led them around to the nesting cove, and the other two males stayed behind feeding and ignored them. My guess is that the quacking is how they identify themselves to each other. The two males who quacked must have been her mate and the mate of the other one; the non-quacking male's probably a bachelor.

So it's new birdlife galore on the river this spring!