Since we're just a 3-minute walk from a little lake, we often see geese, ducks, frogs, turtles, even a crane! in our neighborhood. One morning, we woke up to the sound of a goose, sitting on our garage roof, just 10 feet from the kid's bedrooms.
About a month after moving in, we suddenly noticed a duck that had come to make a nest 8 feet from our front door, right next to a prickly barberry bush. A day later, we noticed 3 eggs in the nest! Then, another, and another--until later that week, the duck had laid 11 eggs!
(ducks must have amazing hearing--if we were just standing at the window watching her, she'd cock her head like this and stare at us...)At that point, she started sitting on them almost constantly. She thankfully became quite okay with us leaving and coming, the kids screaming and playing, and stopped flying away every time Lily would scream at her.
She got to the point where she was sitting on those eggs the ENTIRE day, except for a little while each evening, right around dusk. We did a little research on the web, and found that typically, the incubation period for ducklings was 28 days. So, we knew that somewhere in the 3rd or 4th week of June--we'd have eleven little ducklings walking around our yard! How exciting!!!
Finally, on a Wednesday evening, we noticed that one egg had a small crack in it. Would this be the night??? The next morning, when Ollie and I came down just after 7am, there were ducklings!!! We opened the door, snuck out to take a peak, and found 4 or 5 little heads poking up. We took pictures, and went inside to eat.
By the time Lily woke up (an hour later), the ducks were gone!!! All that was left was a few broken eggs.
We have no idea what happened to the other 6 eggs, and haven't seen a duck since. We DO get to peak at little families of ducks on the lake, and we're assuming one of those families is ours...but hopefully next year the momma duck will be back to build another nest! (And maybe this time, Lily can see them, too!)
1 comment:
How neat! Soo cute!
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