And today's duck is?

Today’s duck is one I have never seen before. I spotted it in Stadtpark a few days ago.

I described it to Merisi and she said it sounded like a Mandarin duck - but I have checked my bird book and it does not seem to have the right features.

The best I can come up with is a Pochard – but any help would be appreciated.

So the reason I posted ‘spot the badger’ was that I have (finally) started to get together the family history.

This is a project that was started by my ancient and venerable brothers some years ago and in which I was sort of involved. They have done a lot of work but we do not yet have a central site which is accessible to everyone.

So I have decided to finally bring it to a conclusion and have acquired the appropriate software and membership of ‘ancestry.com’.

Give the nature of our fractured family – and the paucity of cameras at the time – we have very few pictures from our early years and I was rustling through the few that we do have and found the one of the Badger in 1953 that was in fact acquired only recently.

The three brothers did a tour of the NSW Riverina district - where we were all raised and spent our early years.

The school in Deniliquin was having an open day so we popped in and they were able to produce that photo.

I am glad that I do not these days look like I do in that photo.