Quote:
Originally Posted by Jolly Amaranto
I provide nesting boxes for wild black bellied whistling ducks in my back yard. In one of the boxes this year, four different hens were laying eggs (called egg dumping). One mating pair ended up sitting on the lot and 38 ducklings hatched. All the ducklings bonded to that pair and the big family moseyed off to the local pond.
A few years ago there were only two hens worth of eggs and 21 hatched.
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Several years ago when i still commuted to work, just as I got home and pulled into the garage I saw a mama duck quaking in our garden area. She was acting weird. I walked over to see if I could figure what was going on. She walked over to the storm drain and I heard a lot of cheep cheep cheep. Evidently she was walking her babies along and she hopped up over the storm drain opening, and all the babies just went down the drain and were trapped.
My wife arrived home a short time later as one neighbor lady showed up. The neighbor lady went home to get her husband, and I went to get my pick from the storage shed. I removed the manhole cover. Those are heavy! In TV and movies they bad guys lift them with one hand and escape from below. Yea, right. Anyway, I got the manhole cover off, and the neighbor dude climbed down.
We have a net to our Koi pond, so I handed him the net and a 5 gallon bucket. He gathered them all up, and handed the equipment to me, and climbed out. With all the people around mama duck have flown off. I don't know if she figured we had it handled, or we were going to eat the babies, whatever no mama duck.
I called the Wildlife rescue and they asked that we keep them safe and bring them to them in the morning. The neighbor lady said she would take them to her house and put them in the guest bathroom bathtub. She called all her grandkids and other kids to come see the ducklings.
The next morning they drove them down to the wildlife rescue, and the had a couple of pair of parents ducks, and they said the ducklings would blend right in, and be raised as wild ducks. They would all fly off when they grew up and go back to nature. The neighbor brought back my bucket and we all felt like good.