Tonight I am grateful for my mama duck and her papa who came for a swim in our pool. On 4/28/04 I joined Bella to ask questions about Mallards because I had a pair nesting in my front flower bed. That is how I came up with the name I use on this site!
Anyway, the pair started swimming on our pool cover about 2 weeks ago and 1 week ago, I noticed a BIG hole behind my rosebush in my front flower bed!
For the next few days, I kept watching but I didn't see anything happening. Then I got up for school one morning at 6:45 and as I left, she was on the nest! When I came home, however, she was gone. She had laid an egg and tried to cover it with mulch!
I didn't want to disturb her or scare her off while she was settling in, so I left everything alone. After a few days, I looked again and she had a couple! I gathered a double hand full of oak spirals, dry leaves and rose petals and put a pile in front of her nest, under the rose bush.
The next morning, she was back on the nest and in the afternoon, she was gone again, but she had used ALL the stuff I had left for her.
Every day for about week, this was going on and one day when I came home from school, I used my pencil to move the coverings and saw she had about 8 or 9!
I covered the eggs again and added some more covering stuff, including the drying tops of my bulbs. The next morning she was back on the nest and THIS time, she had the drying stem tops of the bulbs across everything, like a moses basket. It was so cute!!
Well, that was last week and within a few days, she started spending more and more hours each day on the nest until Thursday she spent all day until about 5 P.M. Friday A.M. I went to school at 6:30 and she was on the nest and when I came home at 2 P.M., my son, then my husband BOTH said she was "panting" because the sun was beating right on her after noon. I got a bowl and filled it with water and put it out for her. She kinda "hissed" at me and slowly moved off the nest closer to the rose bush while I slowly put the water down, but then she drank some.
The next morning we went to the store and bought a 4 ft. evergreen tree in a bucket and placed it beside the rose bush to give her shade between noon and 3 P.M. When we came in at 1:30 it wasn't close enough to her in the north so we had to move it about 5 inches and now she is perfectly in the shade!
The last time she nested (last year), she used the flower bed on the other side of the porch which is completely shaded by the BIG 80FT tree. I'm not sure why she changed, except that I can see her better.
So, to bring it up to today...She has been nesting 6 or 7 days, slipping away for 1-2 hours each evening for a quick swim and a bite to eat. Tonight she met her mate HERE and swam, back where it ALL BEGAN. (how funny!) I took pictures of them in the pool and I will get pictures of her on the nest and the babies as they hatch.
Isn't that cool? What will tomorrow bring? Have fun!
Trish
so my hubby said only the female now has permission. 