My walk to the post office in the next village takes me across two branches of the River Great Ouse. As I paused on the first bridge, there was little to watch except for a flotilla of mallards. They were drifting quietly in well-separated pairs of duck and drake. On the next stretch I was met with a noisy palaver of quacking and splashing. There was nothing neat and ordered about this group. Ducks and drakes were jumbled up: drakes were chasing drakes and drakes were chasing ducks. Why should there be frantic rivalry and courtship in one group and connubial serenity in the other? Mallards start courting as early as September when the drakes come out of moult and have swapped the dull eclipse plumage for their colourful nuptial dress. Most of them are paired by now but some will not have settled with a mate until February. There is an excess of drakes, caused partly by a higher mortality among nesting ducks. The spare drakes descend on the flocks of peaceful pairs and cause trouble by trying to usurp the females. Mallards do not start nesting until March so it seems a waste of time and energy to start pairing up to six months early. The same is true for many of the birds in my garden which have been associating in pairs for some time. I imagine that the competition for mates among male birds is so strong that they must stake a claim as earlier as possible. So they have a long engagement before consummation. It reminds me of mediaeval royal families in which princes and princesses were betrothed in infancy, before rival dynasties could step in.
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