A Duck to Water — G.B. Stern

From the author of The Ugly Dachshund comes a charming fable of animal life in the "Meadow." A duckling, dissatisfied with being one of eleven other black ducklings, gets the notion that he is actually a swan.Or perhaps even a peacock The other animal characters include a small misunderstood cat named Tiger Tim, a goose of decided literary bent, and a poor brown hen, used as a surrogate mother for the ducklings, who cannot for the life of her figure out how her chicks became web-footed.
British author Gladys Stern wrote over forty novels, several plays, short stories and biographies from the 1930s until her death in 1973.