Plume, one of our little creek ducks, hatched two beautiful little Pekin babies Tuesday. They came off the nest by themselves to feed and water in our little alley right behind our house, but Plume kept going back to the nest. I told our neighbor that we needed to clean out the unhatched eggs, and she was going to do that this morning. To her surprise and mine, Plume had hatched two more babies and still was on the nest. Her first two have stayed in a plant saucer of water in the alley almost all day by themselves. We decided she was not going to claim them, so we caught them and took them inside, which, at the time, didn't seem to bother the mother. About an hour later, she came off the nest with the two she had hatched this morning, and began quacking like crazy, apparently looking for the first two. We have a lady who is willing to take them and raise them, but we now wonder if Plume will keep them herself. The only thing we can figure that happened is another duck dumped eggs in the nest at a later time, causing the hatching to be so irregular. What do you do when eggs hatch at such different times? Plume seems to want to both take care of the early ones and yet, stay on the nest to hatch the rest. What to do?
