We’re not sure what happened early Monday morning. I woke up around 12:30am to the resident mallard quacking her little head off in our yard. Cassandra was already in the kitchen and had removed an attentive cat from the cracked open window near the nest, also wondering about the noise. Cassandra thought she heard some noises from a smaller duck. Unclear on why the duck was quacking continuously, and Cassandra already having stepped outside to check on the situation, I simply closed both the kitchen window – to prevent a cat from making her uncomfortable – and my bathroom window – so I could get back to sleep.
Come morning, I noticed that she was more protective than usual of the nest. Instead of just watching me when I stepped outside, she’d half raise in the nest or stretch her neck out to watch me. (Not surprisingly, I used the zoom option to take this photo.) That was the situation for the morning and part of the afternoon. By the time I stepped out for the mail though, she was gone, and the nest was left uncovered.
Until this point, the only time the eggs had been left uncovered was that first day when I noticed – and startled – her. We haven’t been able to see the eggs since then, as they’ve been carefully covered by leaves and feathers any time she wandered off for a meal (a couple times a day).
And so we’re left wondering. Did a single egg or two hatch, and more than half a day later, she wandered off with that chick, abandoning the unhatched eggs as unlikely to hatch? That’s certainly a preferable scenario to something having attacked an egg, and her having returned to the nest afterwards. In several photos I took while she was still on the nest Monday morning, I can only spot about half of a broken shell, rather than the mostly intact one separate from the nest in the photo above. Since she abandoned the nest, more of the egg shells have been broken and spread out a bit, though the stash of eggs has been buried in the leaves again, presumably by someone who wants to hide their food source. Hopefully she made it safely to one of the nearby water sources with a hatchling or two.