This is the time of year when the wildlife starts to get a bit interested in mating.  This can result in some battles between competing individuals but, while walking alongside a river, I saw a couple of mallard ducks behaving pretty strangely.  One was male and one female so I think they may have been interested in each other but their behavior was sufficiently strange that I couldn’t be sure that was actually the case.

Initially they were splashing around in the water.  They would seem to dive just below the surface and flap around down there making a lot of noise and moving quite randomly – not necessarily towards each other.  It would stop for a while and then start again.  Very odd behavior to the uninitiated.  After this had gone on for a while, one of them took off followed by the other.  They then appeared to wheel around the sky with a tail chase underway.  This also went on for quite a while before they landed back where they had started and everything seemed to revert to normal.  Anyone who knows what was going on, please let me know in the comments.