The river was full of cottonwood fluff when my husband and I went rowing this afternoon. We had an easy day on our training schedule, so we were just paddling along and enjoying the peaceful sounds of nature.

Then we heard some agitated quacking and wings flapping, right next to us. Before we knew it, we had rowed through several tiny ducklings that were barely noticeable in the floating fluff. I didn’t have my phone to take a picture, but they were even smaller than the ducklings in this photo I took a few years ago:

As far as I could tell, we didn’t injure any of them. We were rowing slowly enough that they mostly got out of the way, and my husband picked up his oar to avoid bumping one of the ducklings. After a minute or so, when we had moved on, the parents flew back down to collect their scattered offspring.