Fat mallard in the gloom

Mallard have done well over the summer. The dry weather was kind to the ducklings and now I see big flights of fowl over the house and the river in the evenings. Autumn has well and truly arrived in this part of Galloway and, as the birds move around on their evening flights, a suitably seasonal mist often rises from the marshes where the new birds were born and raised. I watch for them as the swallows depart, standing on the brink of that sudden descent into darkness and cold winds that comes with a bump in October.

A few teal sometimes join the early mallard. Most of these little ducks were raised on the distant hill lochs and the ditches that run around the peat hags in the uplands. I