Today I screeched my brakes bringing the traffic to a halt.  All this in honour of a family of ducks.  The cutest, fluffiest, most chaotic family of ducks.

I can tell I wasn’t popular with the drivers in the vehicles behind me.  Screeching to a halt, hazard lights on.  Probably from their point of view for no reason at all.

What they couldn’t see was about 10 ducklings.  Some yellow, some brown jogging along the road.  Some where on the pavement with their mum but otherwise they were all over the road.  One even shot off into a puddle for a quick swim before realising that s/he was being left behind and needed to catch up.

I’m afraid this picture is the only one worth showing the others were a fuzzy haze.  Like basset photoblogging capturing these creatures on camera was no mean feat.  Especially when you’re camera is not a fast action SLR.  Oh and you’ve got blokes hanging out of their ute windows making rude gestures.

I did finally get out of the car to get a few shots when a monster in a white van – someone in the building trade I’m sure, decided he couldn’t wait for the family to cross the road to safety.  He overtook the 4 other cars that had pulled up to admire the view and shot passed.  He narrowly missed our stray bathing beauty duckling but he certainly scared them all and they ran like fury down into a drive and out of shot for me.

Boy was I mad.

At the next traffic junction the guy in the ute behind me (with two pretty tough looking dogs in the back) came up beside me and wound down his window.  It was at this point I was locking the door and wondering if I was going to be a victim of road rage.  Fear not blog friends, this is what he said.

How cool was that!  Pity that ****ard had to scare them away.  It’s made my day that has!

And then he shot off down the highway spraying up gravel as he went.  I couldn’t agree more.

The funny thing is that I saw the pair of ducks nesting in the pathway verge earlier this week and thought what a cool picture that would be.  I think today’s performance of showing off their family was much more fun.  The residents of Plateau Road are really lucky to have this duck family to admire for a while.

Now, I’m off to find our neighbourly ducks to see what’s happening there.