The four mallards who live under the pier north of me -- the Ricardos and Mertzes of duckdom, I called them last year -- are back. I think the skinny male (the "advance duck" from the other day) was one of them, here a little ahead of the others. Ricky, probably. Anyway, the way I know they're here is, the buffleheads who like to feed and float in the deeper water have been hanging around near the banks recently. I think they're looking for somewhere to nest. The other morning, around the end of the pier come the four mallards in a row, with one of the females in the lead. They head straight for the female bufflehead. The lead female mallard starts quacking like crazy. The bufflehead -- who's only about two-thirds their size -- looks like she doesn't really want to tangle with them. But she doesn't want to leave without her mate, either. He's nowhere to be seen. Buffleheads dive deep to eat, and he's gone. They can come up ten or fifteen yards from where they went down, so she doesn't know where he's going to reappear. So she starts swimming away from the mallards in a big circle around the place where he went down. The mallards chase her, all in a row, the lead female still quacking. Now here's the thing about ducks: they don't swim very fast. So you have a low-speed duck chase: five ducks in a row, swimming in a wide, slow circle, the second one quacking, all of them very serious. And you have me, cracking up on the shore. The male comes back up, takes a breath without seeing what's going on, and dives again. More circling and quacking. Finally he comes up again, not far, coincidentally, from her. She communicates in some way that it's time to scram, and they do, back to deep water. The mallards jiggle their tail feathers in the buffleheads' direction, and swim back to the far side of the pier.