it was after a winter storm early last year, 2013. one of our neighbor boats at regatta point marina had a swim platform that was very low to the water and it was littered with debris, mostly pine needles. i never paid much attention, passing it while walking up and down the dock, but one day, i noticed the duck. she was easy to miss, a little brown thing blending right in there with the debris, just sitting there not moving and i wondered - is that a nest? well, one day, when there was no duck sitting there, i took a closer look. it just looked like a clump of pine needles and junk but there were indeed 12 eggs and she had covered them up with more pine needles! cool, i thought - i can watch this development, it will be fun! i did some reading up on mallards and i walked by several times a day to check on her. i had some dog food left over from the swan (another story for another time) so i brought some over and tossed them on the swim platform and left. when i came back later, the food was gone, so i started bringing some every day. well, the crows found the nest one day while the little mama duck was gone and they got three of the eggs before some of my neighbors managed to chase them away. we were all pretty upset about the broken eggs and i decided that i better not be tossing food all over the swim platform to attract the crows either. instead, i put a pile of food behind the nest and camouflaged them with some pine cones. the first time i did that while the duck was sitting on the nest, she got up in fright but she wouldn't leave. i just kept talking to her in a soft voice and left as soon as i had put the food down so that she would know that i didn't mean any harm. also, her nest was getting a bit thin so i brought over some more pine needles and the next time i looked, they had been rearranged and incorporated into the nest. this went on for about a month - food and pine needles - she would watch me warily but she never got up anymore when i came over. in the meantime, from 12 eggs, it became 9, then 7, then 5. i really have no idea what happened to the other eggs - i checked at least once a day but that was about it. two of the 5 eggs hatched into cute little fluffy ducklings but the next day, they were nowhere to be found and the little mama the duck stood by the nest for a little while looking lost and confused. then i didn't see her any more after that. i was heartbroken and depressed. when i inspected the nest after she left, there was nothing there but pine needles - not even egg shells or any trace of anything remotely duck. oh well... it was sad and i didn't want to talk about the duck for a while. but i did have photos at least, so for one brief moment....
link: mama duck and eggs
a few months later, in the dead of summer, tom came home in the rain one day and told me that there was an injured duck on the walkway from the parking lot so i went out to look at it. was it the same duck? i think so. she wasn't afraid of me. or maybe she was just too weak. this duck looked like it had been attacked by some animal. she had puncture wounds on the top and the sides of her head and all the feathers had been stripped from her neck. she was also wet, which is unusual for a duck. she just looked sick and weak. i didn't know what else to do so i brought her a handful of dog food and she ate that right up, so i went back to the boat and brought her another handful, and from that time on, a couple of times a day, i'd come out and look for her and give her some food. she was never in the same place but the funny thing is how every time i was out, she was somehow always around, not too far away. i kept saying that i didn't want her to know where i lived but pretty soon, she had figured that out and would come over and chirp at the door. the bad part was that a drake started accompanying her and before i knew it, i had TWO ducks to feed. he was always scared of me and wouldn't come close though. interestingly enough, neither of them were scared of consuelo at all. in the meantime though, the wounds were healing and her feathers started growing out again and covered up the scar. i transitioned the two to cracked corn instead of dog food but they didn't seem to understand the corn so i mixed in some dog food with it but the corn was so messy on the dock that i decided they had to have bowls. that was funny because they didn't understand bowls either. these were clear glass bowls so i didn't think it was going to be so complicated but apparently, it was, so back to dog food - i had to make a trail of dog food that led to the bowl and it took a little while before they finally figured out that you went over the top of the bowl instead of whacking your bill on the glass! the drake was hogging the bowl so then it became two bowls, one for her and one for him. and then it became three bowls, one for water to push the corn down. it was getting out of control! but after a while, they came less and less and one day, they didn't come at all. i kind of missed them but we were cruising every weekend anyway.
link: injured mama duck
they showed up again in the late fall. by this time, they had both gone wild, not coming too close but hanging around like they were remembering me from somewhere. i knew it was my mama duck because of the bump on her head - scar tissue. the corn got thrown in the shallows instead of being served in bowls and they didn't come every day. sometimes, the tide was just too high and i couldn't throw the corn far enough and it would sink too deep for them to dabble so i started walking up the dock to the shallows with the corn. they eventually began to follow. and so it went - corn in the shallows behind our boat at low tide and corn in the shallows by the fixed dock at high tide. they didn't come regularly though. in february, we moved for a month to the port urbanna marina as regatta point was having a water issue. when we got back, it took two days before the ducks showed up again. one stormy day in april, they were standing on the floating dock just behind the boat, waiting around. when i came out, she went to the finger pier close to the door and chirped. it was windy, it was raining, and they wanted to be fed? the drake backed off as usual but my little brown duck had no fear. so i dug out the glass bowls again. who knows what goes through their little duck minds? certainly not i! i just feed them.
link: bowl feeding
this spring, my little brown duck was scarce. i suspected that she was nesting. she did come over late one night though when tom and i were just getting home from dinner out with friends. she followed me home so i came out with some corn for her but it was high tide so i had to walk back up the dock to toss it in the shallows. that was the last time i saw her before we started cruising again. interestingly enough, the drake, who had always been wary of us came over ALONE three times for bowl feeding. he had never come without her before. i had hoped to see her one more time before we went off cruising. now i'll never know if she had a family or not.
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