Help collecting feral duck eggs

[polk county]

There is an urban lake downtown that has hundreds of feral domesticated birds. There are Indian runner, barnyard mallard, geese, swans, muscovies and several others I can ID.
I want to collect eggs and incubate them at home. Does anyone think that these birds lay frequently? Where would I find the eggs? How would I know if the eggs are good to incubate? These eggs are totally free and I don’t think that anyone would care if I took them.

What would be the best way to do this?

thanks

 

[desertdarlene]

The first thing I would do is talk to the lake or city staff about this, mostly for your own protection. You don't want to do anything that might get you into trouble. I know of one neighborhood lake that has a lot of domestic birds there on purpose (such as adopting or purchasing them) and might not like people taking the eggs.

 

[mahsmaj]

I was wondering the same thing!

 

[Senna95]

I'm not sure who you'd talk to, but I'd bet the department of fish and wildlife would love to have you take some. Nice as the "wild" domesticated ducks may look on a lake or pond, they wreak havock with the native wild duck population. They interbreed, and mess up the wild genes, which will ALWAYS be in the gene-pool from then on. And that's not even mentioning the possible diseases domestic ducks may carry!

We had a rabbit problem at a local park: they were taking over, interbreeding with the wild population, and bringing in diseases. The park finally had to bait (with poison) ALL the rabbits in the park, including the wild ones. Luckily the problem was localized only to the park.

Ducks fly (or their mixed offspring fly), migrate, and spread all over the world. "They" (the experts??) say that many wild malards already carry domestic duck genes. Same problem has happened with geese. In our river this last spring, we had 3 domestic geese swimming along with about 10 Canadian geese, and they had babies!

Sorry, didn't mean to get on my soap-box, but I'm sort of an environmentalist and ecologist at heart. Please don't let your ducks go at the near-by lake. First of all, you duck will probably become coyote food, but if not, could cause a lot of problems for the wild ducks.

 

[kangababy]

Quote:
You need to talk to someone about this. I know that the mallards and depending on the geese (canada) are federally protected and possible the the swans and if you take their eggs you are breaking the law. You can't bother their nesting site even if it is on your property.

and this time of year, I don't know of any of thing that would be laying.

I know that our major wanted someone to come in and try to remove some of the Canada geese from the park and had to talk with people and the Fed Fish and Game... Yeah that didn't go well. I know that they do hire peopole from time to time to "weed" out the muscovie population from the park.