On June 16th I received a call from the Cody Rec Center about a duck that had put her nest under a bush by their front door. Seemed a bad choice considering there is a pond and island just a short distance away near the back of the library. When I got there I found some little girls about to pick the eggs up. I gathered them all into a box, brought them home and put them in my incubator.
It takes 28 days for mallard eggs to hatch. On July 10th all nine eggs hatched so I apparently got them just a few days after she'd finished laying. One of the babies appeared to have some sort of neurological problem, couldn't keep its head from flopping backwards. I put them in a brooder with a water bottle and food and kept an eye on them.
As you can see by the photo, they are all doing just fine and the baby with the problem? It's corrected itself and there's no difference between that one and the others. Unfortunately because they weren't hatched in the normal manner, under mom, they don't have any natural oil on their down feathers so they're not waterproof. Because of that they can't be in water deeper than a couple inches for about a month. If it's too deep they can get waterlogged and drown. At this time they're having fun playing in their shallow water pan and growing bigger with each passing moment. When ready they'll be taken to a nearby pond for release to the wild.
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