It’s waterfowl baby season again! This year, for the first time I can remember, we have baby ducks. We always have baby geese, but never ducklings. I assume there must be some treachery involved in this, since ducks naturally have babies unless someone stops them—and I suppose this someone must be our neighborhood association, which doesn’t want thousands of ducks on our lake. Whatever they do to maintain the duck population at reasonable levels, I assume they also do it to our local rabbits, since we continue not to live with wall-to-wall rabbits.

As for the geese, I suspect they’re protected, so there’s nothing anyone can do about them. I guess I could find out real answers to all these questions if I were really curious, but I’m not.

Anyway, here are the baby ducks. The duck in front is diving underwater for whatever reason it is that ducks dive underwater. Neither siblings nor mama look very impressed, but mama looks happy and proud. This is because all ducks look happy thanks to the shape of their bills and our happy childhood memories of Donald Duck, but who cares? They look happy, and that makes me happy.

Tomorrow: baby geese. But no lunchtime photo. What can this mean?

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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