This morning I saw something I really didn’t need to see.

A female mallard duck was lying splayed, but not flattened, in traffic on the opposite side of the freeway from me. It didn’t look dead yet. I’m not sure what it was doing in the road in the first place, but I’m guessing it had been hit. To make things worse, there was a mallard drake, almost certainly her mate, heading into traffic to see what the problem was.