Nature Study #44 and #45 ~ Mallards and Geese

Hello guys!

Every Wednesday that it suits, our family and a family from church get together for nature study. We study tons of things; grasshoppers, mulberries,  quartz, even poison ivy! I chose to show you two recent studies we’ve done. One’s on Canadian Geese and one’s on Mallard Ducks. 😉 I have photos of them, and at the end I’ll show you my pages in my nature notebook. 😀 Let’s start with the ducks. Here are some things I’ve learned.

The female takes care of the eggs and then the ducklings completely by herself. She is very protective over them.

The male  Mallard has a greenish iridescent head.  He also has little tail-feather curls that are quite noticeable.

The mallard ducklings follow their mom everywhere. They are VERY FLUFFY. 😛

The female mallard is the only one that quacks! The male makes more of a rasping sound. Both ducks have blue patches on their wings, but sometimes the male’s blue patch is covered by his feathers. The male has a yellow bill while the female has a more black bill.

Here is my notebook page.

Now for the Canadian geese.

Geese tongues are actually quite… mammal-like. If you’ve seen a baby robin or most other birds you can see that they have pointy, hard-looking tongues.

The male Canadian geese can be extremely aggressive and protective (he’s the tall one in the photo).

The geese often return to the same nesting place year after year (they have mates for life).

They lay 5-10 eggs! Think about it, a kind of dove lays two eggs, and they are much smaller than geese eggs. And then, the eggs hatch into fluffy goslings! 😀

Canadian geese eat seeds, insects, and aquatic plants.

And my page I did about them.  I TRIED to make it stand up, but it wouldn’t. 😦

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I was super happy when I remembered the photos I had taken of the geese and goslings last year! They are with my old camera, and thus worse quality, but much better than nothing. 🙂

Do you like ducks or geese better?

Would you like to see more posts like this? If so, then on which of these topics: Spring Blubs/Spring Flowers, Bumblebees, Pussy Willow, Salamanders, or worms? 🙂 Comment to tell me. 😉

Does anybody know how hard it is to make an inchworm making another inchworm? ANYBODY? XD