Mountains and Marshes. David Rains Wallace
near Brentwood each fall. In Mount Diablo’s rain shadow, the oak-dotted grassland there hardly seems the place for long-billed shorebirds, but curlews eat grasshoppers as well as marsh worms and snails. Or like a pair of mallards I saw at a tiny cattle pond for a few years.
The pond dried up in summer, so they went elsewhere then, but they were back in the winter and spring. During a wet year, they raised a brood. One day, after seeing the drake on the pond, I found the female leading a troop of ducklings in a creek on the other side of the ridge above it. The next spring was a dry one, and the pond hardly held water, but the mallards still came back. I saw them one day, huddled in a cattail patch as though wondering what to do next.
—2014
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