Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

My whistling ducks out my office window are losing their reflections day by day.

No, they aren’t becoming vampires. The pond is drying up. The drought here is getting really dangerous for all Floridians.

The whistling ducks (which look like a cross between a duck and a sleek goose, with their long legs and their “Roman nose” beaks) and the regular ducks sit in the shade of the live oak on the bank of the disappearing pond and stare out at the lowering water level, which means less fish, which means less food. The herons and egrets stand in the middle of the pond amongst the lily pads, and their knees don’t even get wet.

Once in a while a wood stork struts by, looking disgruntled. (But then again, wood storks always look disgruntled.) And the one mamma duck with babies is losing them at the rate of one every day or two… not their reflections but her real babies, the little bright-eyed ducklings who scurry across the lily pads chasing bugs.

The dragonflies are out in full force though. Eating lunch today, I saw a grass stem with six small green dragonflies lined up facing exactly the same way, and a much bigger, pink dragonfly on the tip of the stem, facing the opposite way.

We wish it would rain.