Aww !!! Now I wanna bwing them po' wee bebbehs home befo' they die...!!!

`
heh.

Yeah... ...like I can afford duck food...Maybe the neighbors would think they were cute & give 'em some crackers or somethin'.


Sadly, perhaps, you're doubtless correct about their eventual fate. Barring a weird winter like this one just past, open areas like that will be buried under snow. Red foxes come to mind as a likely predator that might end up eating 'em.

As for the pics - I made one attempt to recover the corrupted files on the drive. Got a few back, but most are still "in limbo", as the files are supposedly still there, but in some corrupted state, and I don't know how to fix or access them.
What really annoyed me about the whole business is that I bought the damn fool backup drive in hopes of avoiding exactly what happened in case of a PC drive malfunction.

Oh, well...