Making Way for Ducklings

 

When I was in preschool my dad brought home ducklings. My brother and I were, as any four- and six-year old would be, very excited. And so Wild, Peeper, Speedy, and Mighty Duck (my personal favorite) became part of our family. They were Mallards, so they were the cutest little balls of black and yellow fluff I had ever seen. We cuddled them and played with them, and they followed us around like we were their mother duck.

The ducklings soon grew out of the cute, cuddly phase. And teenage ducks are not too pretty. They simultaneously lost their baby down feathers and grew new, adult feathers. By the next spring, though, they were full-grown ducks. Wild, our only boy duck, had a beautiful green head and the females all had a purple stripe running across their wings.

I was overjoyed when, in first grade, Mrs. Nelson told us that we would be hatching ducklings in class. We put eggs in an incubator, watched them hatch, and got to play with them just as I had played with my ducks when they were babies. I still chased my ducks around the yard in order to catch them and cuddle, and I still brought them bugs I found for special treats, but baby ducks are just so much cuter and more fun than grown-up ducks.

The next spring my best friend Holly and I had a great idea. We knew that eggs usually needed to be sat on by their mothers to stay warm enough to hatch, but we also knew that there were other ways of keeping the eggs warm (as we had observed in our first grade classroom with the incubator). What else is warm? We asked ourselves.

Our beds! Of course! We would keep the eggs under our pillows while we slept! What an ingenious idea to come from the minds of second graders!

And so we each took a few eggs from the little hutch in my backyard. Holly walked the three blocks to her house, swinging a little cloth bag of eggs as she went. The eggs cracked from being swung about in this way, but thankfully there were plenty more where those came from.

I think it was two or three days before one of the eggs broke in my bed. I didn’t say anything to my parents for a long time, but it was hard to deny when my mom went to wash my sheets. The other eggs never hatched, and we learned after some research that duck nests and incubators are a lot warmer than beds.

With age comes knowledge. We had failed once, but by third grade we really knew what we were doing. Nesting ducks get really mad when you take their eggs away, so my mom had begun boiling and replacing eggs so that the female ducks still had something to protect and keep warm in their nests. To keep track of which eggs were which, my mom marked the boiled eggs with an X in red nail polish.

So one day Holly and I went out to the hutch in the backyard and grabbed the eggs out of Peeper’s nest, marking each with a red nail polish X.

All we had to do now was wait. We didn’t have to worry about keeping the eggs warm or cracking them. Our work was done; it was all up to Peeper now. She continued to guard her eggs like a good mother. My mom thought she had outsmarted the duck, but Holly and I giggled as we anxiously waited for the new ducklings to hatch. We were the smart ones, now.

My mom had no idea what Holly and I had done until one spring day when little beaks began to poke their way out of the blue-green eggs in the backyard.