Mallard duckling

Back blip.
I went to a garden party just off Clapham Common after work; I got off the tube and went for a little amble on the common since I was a bit early... I got to the boating pond, and spotted a female mallard with four tiny ducklings! Two of them are pale (like this one), and two are darker. I don't think that the pale colouration is typical of mallard ducklings; I've not seen millions of them, but I think that the darker coloured ones look "normal" to me. They are all super-cute.

The boating pond is a very odd place to bring up chicks: it is very bare with no shelter to speak of, the edges are very steep and the ducklings really have to struggle to get out (which they can only do where the kerb-like edges are broken), and there is no greenery in the pond on which they can feed... Hum, they seem pretty cheerful, and graze on the edge of the pond (once they've struggled out) or on algae that coats the waterline on the pond's edge.

This is one of the pale two ducklings; there was a strong wind blowing, and one end of the pond was very choppy which was hard work for the ducklings (they kept on being swamped by the waves) but made for quite interesting reflections and surfaces from a photographic point of view...

I was going to post a picture showing the four ducklings with their mother (for scale), but have since taken a cuter one, so that theme is tomorrow's pic...