In our new home - I still call it that 'cuz we've only been in it 3 years - we are fortunate enough to back up the the neighborhood 'lake'. This has provided us with many evenings of entertainment watching the vast array of birds coming to visit and the fish/frogs jumping in the water, etc. In addition to the usual birds, we've seen blue herons, green herons, grebes, mallards, Canadian geese (unfortunately - they are nasty birds), catfish (we have several albino ones), bullfrogs, frogs and tree frogs. Also, we have raised several broods of bluebirds.
One of the bonuses (for us anyway) is having the mallards take up residence at the lake. Little did we know that they were actually scoping out my flowerbeds for their next nest. On a Saturday three weeks ago, D thought she heard the computer making funny noises and came out to investigate. Well, it wasn't that but Mama duck making all kinds of racket in the flowerbed outside the kitchen. We didn't think much of it until we went out on the patio that evening and startled her out of the bed. Lo and behold, she had laid 4 eggs that morning. For the next 8 days, she laid one egg daily. She is now sitting on the nest of 12 eggs and has been for 2 weeks.
We are now on 'egg' watch. I did some research on how long it takes from laying the eggs until they hatch. 23 - 28 days is the incubation time frame for Mallards. This weekend will make it 3 weeks, so we should be seeing little hatchlings soon. I hope that we can get a picture of them before Mama whisks them away to the lake.
On a side note, there is another mama mallard & 7 ducklings swimming happily on the lake.
Funny, we've only seen one male mallard. He's been a busy guy... :P
No comments:
Post a Comment