On Easter Sunday, March 31st, my daughter was helping to hide plastic Easter eggs for her cousin’s little boy when she found a real egg in the middle of a shallow hole. I thought the egg too large for most of the birds of the area, and assumed it to belong to the ubiquitous Canada geese. On April 8th, I found that the eggs had grown to three. I was telling an associate about that when he educated me about the egg-laying habits of ducks.
“(The female will) lay one egg a day for about ten days, then cover up the eggs. When she’s laid all the eggs, she will come back to sit on the nest.”
The nest is built in a sheltered corner of the house and below the living room window. On Tuesday April 9th, I looked out of the living room window to see a female mallard jump, land, and walk away, angrily shaking her tail. I looked at the nest, and in it there were now four eggs. Mom stayed close to the nest for a while, then left.
On Wednesday April 10th, I surprised the mom again, and she flew off the nest that now had five eggs. There were four earlier that morning, so she must have just laid it.
On Thursday April 11th, there were six.
I have noted before that I am a concrete, glass and blacktop, city-man, with little experience or exposure to raw nature. I did embark on birding a few years ago, but I still have not spent much time in “the wild.” Which makes my emotional investment in a normal occurrence — ducks laying eggs — amusing to others. And I am excited. When I told another friend about the eggs, she immediately wanted to know where the water was. She has had some experience with wildlife and knew that the ducklings, which are mobile as soon as hatched, needed to make it to water.
“I hope you get to set the ducklings,” she said. The incubation period of the eggs is about 28 days, according to my other friend, and my research has explained the fuzzy duck-fur that has started to appear about the nest. The female is shedding her breast feathers to provide greater warmth to the nested eggs.
I have witnessed the miracle of birth three times, with my three children, but unless you count the transition periods, I’ve not witnessed wildlife deliveries. (I watched my lab deliver some of her 11 pups, but that was in the back yard and on the fenced porch.) I have seen some wild babies: a woman at work rescued some baby squirrels and kept them in a box beneath her desk, nursing them from a bottle. And some small, untutored children … never mind. I have yet to see the process completed outside of nature programs, which mostly concentrate on the violent close of the circle of life. So I want to see these guys being born.
Deadline pressures clawed this column from my hands long before the eggs hatched, but not before the mallard had filled the perfectly proportioned hole with nine eggs, a calcium production feat of — to my mind — monumental proportions. In the meantime, I will try to be properly respectful of the mother’s care of her charges, watching, waiting, photographing, counting and recording the eggs, hoping for the day the shells break open and the babies emerge.
And I would love to see them marching across the blacktop behind mom’s shaking tail, quacking and heading toward the water, continuing the circle of life of egg, egg, duck.