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one thing but also the wildlife that inhabit the river; muskrats, beaver, weasel, the raccoon that come to feed on its banks, the skunks and an occasional fox and the ferals, domestic cats returned to the wild; and there is the problem of food supply and the pollution, man's waste and neglect, sometimes just plain vandalism that endanger the ducks, shopping carts, car and truck parts, oil, antifreeze, gasoline, transmission fluid, rubbish, plastic especially, trash of all sorts just tossed over the bank and into the river. It not only endangers the ducks but other wildlife as well and it pollutes the water and in time endangers we who are human.

Mallards feed mostly in the shallow waters near the shoreline where they search for snails and grubs and a variety of insects as well as the seeds, roots and leaves of water plants. On land they feed on weed seeds, grain, grasses, (they love my daylilies) and other plants, the seeds and byproducts left in our harvested fields.

The ducks around here also seem to like to venture into my dooryard, crossing two lanes of traffic to do so. They often have traffic stopped in both directions for the DUCK CROSSING as they visit the people side of the street and they especially like to visit my yard when the daylilies are in bloom. A few folks have gotten a little disgruntled over it but most folks, well, they just stop and wait or get out of their car and usher them across a little faster. The ducks don't seem to mind and no one has run over one.

It all began the spring of 1999 with that first pair of mallard ducks who came to share the river with us. The Black River begins in Plymouth Notch in North Plymouth and meanders its way through Ludlow, Cavendish, Weathersfield and Springfield to the great Connecticut River and from there meanders its way to the sea. In Springfield, the Black River falls some 300 feet over the beautiful Comtu falls over a series of step cascades to the great falls. It is along this stretch of river and the pools of these falls that the ducks decided to make their home; these ducks had come to stay and stayed all winter. Others came to join them from time to time, stayed for a time and left and when autumn came and the leaves fell off the trees most of them flew south as one would expect they might, but not all of them.

It was early that spring that someone spotted and made note of a white domestic goose that had taken up residency, by choice or by abandonment that was never really determined, on

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