What do I do? A mallad duck laid an egg in my yard! (Star: live, move)

[underPSI]

^Right on! This is awesome. I would love to have a similar situation at my house. How neat it would be to actually watch the process. Let the duck be! If you have a pool, she will get in it but she won't leave a huge mess or ruin the pool. Once the duckling gets old enough they'll leave on their own.

[Raleigh2Cary]

Now you can have a two egg omelette.

[ljd1010]

I hope things go well for mother duck snd ducklings. A lot of it depends on the location of your home. We used to have wild guinea hens in our neighborhood in RI but, unfortunatley, the nests were often raided by skunks in search of food.

[Lisalrenee]

How fun! I love that kind of stuff. I have a wren who is nesting on my porch - her babies should hatch any day now. It's exciting to watch!

[convergent]

I would just give her some room and let her do her thing. If you end up with ducklings, then I'd probably just park on the street or at the end of the driveway for a few weeks until they are big enough to fly away.

In our last home in NY, we had a Robin (I assume it was the same one) come and build a nest in the exact same spot on one of the support beams of our deck (walk out basement, so this nest was up about 10' in the air) every year for about five years now. She would lay the eggs, we'd watch the babies grow and see how busy she was feeding them. Then when they were about to burst out of the nest, they were all gone in a day. Each year we would put patio chair cushions underneath the nest because it was concrete and we were afraid they'd get hurt if they fell out. One year, the nest was destroyed after the eggs were laid. They had been there for a few weeks, then we came home and found the nest ripped to shreds. Some predator must have got them. Within a few days, she was busy rebuilding the nest, and then layed a second batch of eggs, and they eventually hatched and flew away. That year was hard because she went a lot later into the season and we had opened our pool and much traffic with kids was going around the nest. During the day, the mother would just fly out to a fence post and sit there until the activity died down. At night though, she'd stay on the nest even if people came out. Must have known it was cooler out at night, and probably thought we couldnt' see her. I got some great pictures of her feeding the babies. It can be a lot of fun to have this happen in your yard... and the inconvenience isn't that big of a deal. The first year she was at our house, I had planned to pressure wash and stain the deck and I had to delay it for a month or two until she was done and gone.

[sandycat]

Don't ducks always come back to the same place each year to lay eggs? I bet this won't be the first time this will happen to you. Keep us posted.

[capertree]

Thank you for sharing your story! I just want to update about duck family.
The mother duck is doing great so far. The last time I counted, there were eleven eggs. Mother duck is sitting on eggs almost all day now. She is amazing. Since this is the first spring season for me in North Carolina and in less than a year old townhouse, I really don't have any idea why she chose this place, but watching her behavior everyday is so wonder-full, and so is North Carolina.

[RDSLOTS]

Oh, lucky you.

My neighbor and I stumbled upon a nest of young bunnies yesterday, while we were mulching the beds in our yards. They are so sweet -- all six of them! I will trade you two bunnies for a few duck eggs?

[Lisalrenee]

I wondered about your ducks? Have you researched how long they nest before hatching? I had a nest of wrens on my patio -- they hatched 2 weeks and 1 day ago, and are gone as of this afternoon. How fast they grow!

[Lindsey_Mcfarren]

My dad used to have an incubator he could hatch chicken eggs, wild turkey eggs, pheasant eggs. It would be cool if you could hatch them out.