Baby duck died with no apparant reason

[jschuette]

Okay so i live in louisiana on the water and we have tons of ducks in the water everyday. Yesterday we saw an abandoned baby duck (very young, didn't have feathers) trying to fight really rough waters and looked to be struggling so I went and got him out of the water and set up a brooder for him (we already had all the materials for this because we had found duck eggs and thought they were going to hatch). The brooder was built so that he could not get in the water at all and had access to food, and we had a heat lamp over half of the big plastic bin he was in. So we get the brooder set up and the first thing i notice is that this duck is extremely sedate. He is completely willing to be held and pet and he would just fall asleep in your hand. I checked on him pretty much every hour on the hour just to make sure he was alright and i first he had some spunk in him and would be attempting to jump out of the brooder but then he just started sleeping and i just figured it was because he was really tired from all the rough water he was fighting. I last checked on him at 3 am and he was still breathing. I get up at 8 am and the duck was just dead. We have no clue what happened to him cause we thought he was fine. We came to the conclusion that he must have inhaled water while out there and just died overnight due to that but i was wondering if anyone would have any input as to what went wrong here.

 

[Isaac 0]

This is a wild duck? Sometimes ducklings have a hard time thriving after hatch.

Very sorry for your loss!

 

[jschuette]

This is a wild duck? Sometimes ducklings have a hard time thriving after hatch.

Very sorry for your loss!

Yes this was a wild duck. I believe it was most likely a mallard. It just kinda shocked me because it really did seem to come out of the blue. And thank you so much. I cried and gave him a proper burial this morning.