Why there were no ducks

I’ve always loved otters. I spent my childhood desperately wanting to see one in the wild. In recent years, Stroud has become a place otters call home and I’ve had multiple otter encounters.

This year there were very few ducklings on the canal near my home. There were noticeably far fewer ducks than usual. Otters will eat ducks. They’re opportunists who eat widely and take advantage of whatever is around. Whoever is around. This year they ate all but one of the cygnets on a nearby millpond, and the one they left died by accident.

Of course the problem isn’t really the otters. They’re just doing what they do. There aren’t enough ducks in the first place, and the reason there aren’t enough ducks is that there aren’t enough wetlands for them. We’ve destroyed most of the wetlands we have in the UK. A wild, complex landscape permeated by water supports a great deal more life than the surviving streams do. How many waterways are now underground, in pipes?

I can’t help but feel sad about the ducks. Not so much the ones who were eaten, but the ones who never existed in the first place. We don’t see what isn’t here. We don’t see what was missing before we were even born. These valleys should have water in their bottoms, there should be more ponds, there should be marshy places.

In the town where I grew up, one of the streams has been restored. For most of my life, it was in a pipe under a factory, and when the factory closed the decision was made to reinstate the water. It is possible to change things, and to change what we’ve done to the landscape. Hopefully at some point, there will be more ducks again.