Milky Mallard

This is the beautiful pale mallard on Wandsworth Common.
I've put her on my blipfolio before (with her ducklings) here.

I'm not sure exactly why she has this colouration: it is possible that she is a hybrid between a wild mallard and a domestic (all white) one, or it might be that she is leucistic (lacking pigments, or expressing them incorrectly). Whatever the cause, she is rather stunning! She positively glows when she's not in shadow which makes her quite tricky to expose for: it is easy to expose for the scene leaving her burnt out, or expose for her leaving her surrounding very dark, but I managed to catch her in a shady patch of the pond which meant she wasn't glowing so brilliantly...

She had five ducklings two weeks ago, but now has only four. Three of them look like typical mallardlings, but one is entirely brown; perhaps this suggests that she has functional pigment genes, but is expressing them incorrectly (as the all brown duckling seems to be doing).

I've also uploaded a picture of a large and very shy cootling. It is almost full sized, but is still entirely downy, and still screams for its parents to feed it!