Anita’s Blog – Not The End of the Story
- jjvanm
- Sep 23
- 5 min read
There’s something to be said about waking up at 4 a.m. I’m a morning writer, so that’s good – mostly, but . . . .
I froze! mid-sentence. A sharp rap knocked just outside my desk window. I stared wide-eyed into the dark, seeing nothing except pitch black beyond my reflection in the window.
There was no wind. The security light above the window had not come on. I saw no movement. I heard no other noise. And I was a sitting duck in a spotlight in our solarium office.
Torn between irritation for the interruption and fear, the flight or fight option kicked in. I fled.
I doused the indoor lights, grabbed the laptop and hid out in the dark on the living room sofa until sunrise. I had awakened with a great story idea for a McAllen Monitor Texas Master Naturalist Saturday story and was eagerly beginning research when the big scare happened.
In the harsh reality of light – when the sun came up and nothing was scary anymore, rational thought knocked at the door of my brain instead of the mystery of the knocking wood. Which is when I thought to ask Google, “What night creature sounds like someone knocking on the door?”
Surprisingly, an answer came quickly: A large-tailed nightjar, Caprimulgus macrurus, produces a hollow, monotonous series of “chonk, chonk, chonk” sounds, which are most often heard at dusk or dawn, according to the owner of a website, wildambience.com, who is a professional nature sound recordist based in Sydney, Australia. Where the large-tailed nightjar is found.
I have heard a common pauraque, Nctidromus albicollis, in the neighborhood in the dark, before dawn many mornings. A photo of the Australian nightjar quite resembles our common pauraque.
Google concluded that Caprimulgus macrurus and Nctidromus albicollis are in the same family, the Caprimulgidae (nightjar) family.
To assuage my fear, and lack of anything else explanatory: raven, chipmunk (not found locally), frog, cricket, bat, moth; I’m going with that – a common pauraque close by most likely spooked me.
A lot of my story ideas come about as I sit at my computer and observe the daytime activity out the windows. I consider it original research; it’s probably more like unintentional research and I document a lot of it photographically.
After I’ve written a story and sent it to the editor or uploaded a blog post to the chapter website, the story often continues.
Take for instance the first alligator story. My Internet research and other information led me to believe that at night, alligators’ eyes reflect red in the light. I can for a fact say that that is not always the case.
My husband and I sort of do an alligator check before we go to bed at night. We step out onto the porch, turn on the light and scan the resaca and bank.
One night, we turned on the feeble outdoor light. I saw a big white orb close to the bank, directly in front of us. It moved. I followed it – visually from the porch. I kept noting its coordinates in relation to clumps of reeds and other shoreline landmarks while my husband, with the binoculars, followed a shadow on the shore that turned out to be an opossum.
We surmised that the alligator was tracking the opossum. Once the opossum was more or less on safer ground and the gator had glided on down the resaca, we turned off the light and went indoors. So, be careful what you read – and believe your observations (mostly).
Another story after the story ended
I’d just filed my copy for another McAllen Monitor Texas Master Naturalist Saturday story, the Muscovy article.
My husband replaced the old feeble yard light (mentioned above) at the corner of the porch roof with something safer and more effective. The ladder was still in place so he could aim it properly after we tested the beam angle that night.
My Muscovy story had ended with the momma duck not having been seen for a while and research had led me to speculate thusly:
“Typically, a mother hen’s supervision and protection end when the ducklings are 12 to 14 weeks old and they are in full feathers and able to fly in short spurts. Only then will she get on with her life, possibly, joining or returning to a large flock.”
Well, Momma duck had not been slacking off while she was gone. She was back to our shoreline with a new batch of chicks. I climbed the ladder and had an excellent angle for photos. When I studied them on my computer screen, I was a bit confused.
The twenty chicks from her earlier brood had identical markings: little fluffy brown bodies with yellow faces and chests. There were thirteen chicks with momma duck this time, nine were brown and yellow just as the other 20 had been. Three were all yellow and one was reddish.
Comparing caruncles on the adult’s face and body feather colors, I can’t help but think it was the same momma duck. I had read that sometimes Mexican Whistling Ducks would lay eggs in a Muscovy nest, but those chicks resemble the brown/yellow bumble bee design, similar to the original 20 Muscovy.
Wanting to know what other ducks might drop eggs into a Muscovy’s nest, I wrote to my favorite birder, Marilyn Lorenz, a well-known local lecturer. If you have the opportunity to attend one of her presentations, do so. She is an excellent, knowledgeable and humorous speaker. Her e-mail answer was just as entertaining and not at all the answer I expected.
Here’s what she wrote:
“Those Muscovy ducks are, shall we say, very open to interracial marriages and the ducklings can be quite diverse in how they look. It would be very difficult to trace mom's heritage, although ‘23andMe’ might be helpful. Then, of course, is the dad of this batch whose heredity is just as mysterious. Some ducks are very particular with whom they mate, others - not so much. Muscovy, like mallards, are definitely in the not-so-much group. Just be grateful she didn't find a rooster when she was in the mood. Imagine what that would look like. Go ahead, imagine it - I dare you.”
Sadly, there are now only four ducklings left from second brood and they are all the brown and yellow combo. I will not be able to watch the odd ducks mature. I researched duck survival rates and found some general information.
The overall survival rate for wild ducklings of all species, not just Muscovy ducks, can range from less than 10 percent to as high as 70 percent, with a high attrition rate in the first five to six weeks.
The most common causes of duckling mortality include predation, adverse weather conditions, starvation, disease, and parasites, according to a Ducks Unlimited site. “Ducklings are excellent fare for nearly every type of predator,” including alligators, fish (largemouth bass), frogs, snakes, turtles and mammals (foxes, raccoons, opossums, feral cats and domestic cats and dogs) and other birds, such as hawks, owls, gulls and herons.
As the mother hen guides her chicks from shore to shore on the resaca, she has a wide expanse to traverse. It’s easy to imagine the dangers from the above list of predators, many of them unseen in the murky resaca waters.
