"The others are gone;" the mallards saw; "it's safe to go back," they hopped up onto the landing to resume posing for me!
The greenhead mallards had let me get surprisingly close to them to draw their picture, but as soon as other humans had neared the bridge, they'd jumped back into the water and swam away. "Well, it had been a fun experience while it lasted;" I thought then. "No one could really expect birds in the wild to...huh? They were back! I shook my head in disbelief but reached for my sketching equipment.
"Just pretend that was a little commercial," the mallards waddled back into the places they had been in before.
"Commercial?" No. Mallards don't watch TV; they couldn't have said that! I just imagined it, right?
