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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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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