Duck Green or Datchet Green?
(This article first appeared in The Villager, August/September 2008)
Photos and Video © Leandra Briggs 2008

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We had our own very special eco-event (in fact, nine of them!) here on Datchet Green earlier this year.

There is no pond or stream on Datchet Green but, perhaps because it is so peaceful here, one cold wet day in mid-March four ducks - three boys and a girl - suddenly moved in and set up a ménage a quatre. Spending all day walking round the Green, or curled up under shrubbery, they slept at nights snuggled together in the middle of the Green.

We put out bowls of water as surrogate ponds, and fed our new neighbours with bread which we floated in the ‘ponds’ so as to make the ducks feel ‘at home’ in scooping it out of the water. Sometimes, the ducks felt so at home they climbed into the ‘ponds’!

Well, as the weather improved and nature being what it is when a young man’s springtime fancy turns to thoughts of love, there ensued a number of monumental male battles for the favours of the young lady duck. The fiercest, full of sound and fury, took place on the lawn just outside my kitchen window, and sometimes I feared for the lives of the vanquished.

However, as is the way of these things, eventually everything sorted itself out - and one Alpha-Duck emerged as having won the hand (so to speak) of the Lady . And peace reigned. One of the other boys was constantly chased off, but always returned. And the other just kind of ‘hung out’ with Mr and Mrs, ingratiating himself as a look-out for food - and when it appeared he would rush off quacking loudly to Mr and Mrs and lead them back to where we had put out bread! We all assumed that he was tolerated by Alpha and Mrs because he performed this useful role, with which he seemed very content, in Duck Society - whereas the other guy must have been a threat to Mr Alpha’s supremacy, and was treated by him accordingly as The Outsider.

Well, this continued for about two months - and then suddenly, one brilliantly sunny, warm spring morning, on 6 May 6, Mr and Mrs Duck appeared on Datchet Green with their nine new ducklings! With Dad trailing along behind, Mum led her babies round the Green to the ‘pond’ in front of my house, and then back across the gardens to other houses - Dad shouting at the other two males if they got too close! (They weren’t worried about us humans at all!)

“Does this mean we are grandmothers?” one of the ladies from the StyleAcre houses here asked me. “Yes,” I replied, “ of course!”

That afternoon Mr and Mrs Duck led the Ducklings along Baker’s Lane and down Bell Lane towards the pond at Sotwell House - and a posse of Datchet Greener-s (including John Brewerton in his wheelchair) went with them to ensure their safe arrival in their new home where, we believe, they are living happily ever after!

We are thinking of renaming ‘Datchet Green’ as ‘Duck Green’ - !

Leandra Briggs