My husband allowed a duck to start sitting on her eggs which we had never done before. So we allowed her a quiet place to stay and watched to see what would happen. She finally had two babies hatch and then one died. Another baby never made it out of the egg before she shoved it off the nest and we discarded it. One more baby made it a day or so and then it died. A couple more didn't make it out of their shells. We chalked this up to natural selection. But the mother was finally done and we cleaned the nest area out and the week old baby was doing wonderful! Then this morning, my husband found the baby dead with a lot of its neck feathers gone and the body mauled. No one could have done it but the mother as they were still secluded. We are heart sick to think we should have taken the babies away to save them! We have raised multiple flocks of day old babies from hatcheries and thought this baby would be different because the mother raised it. We won't do this again! It's to disheartening!
