For the past five years a female mallard has nested in my yard — and after 28 days of brooding each year produces a dozen or so fluffy brown and yellow puffballs and leads them from the nest to water. We have a small pond in our backyard, alluring to ducks, who I assume found it on some flyover en route to the larger body of water down the road, in Humboldt Park, and the ducklings reliably spend a few hours or — once —three days paddling around, sleeping, and shaking off the trauma of being hatched before they light off for the park.
Last year we had a small panic after the nest was invaded by an unidentified critter one night (raccoon? possum? alley cat?) and the eggs were all destroyed. But undeterred, the mama duck picked herself up and made a new nest, in a safer corner of the yard, and after another month of so we joined her and eight offspring in a parade to the park, as they need some help crossing the four lanes of busy North Avenue.
This year, a male mallard has been hanging around for weeks, but the female came and went, only sticking around for an hour or so a day to float in the pond, eat mealworms, and chat with her partner. We looked everywhere, but no nest could be found in the yard. We assumed she had made one nearby but had no confirmation until yesterday, when she came marching down the alley leading eleven ducklings and made a beeline under our fence and into the pond. They were there for all of 24 hours before bugging out. When I got home from crew practice they were gone, but please enjoy this video shot just before I left to go row.
Happy trails, ducks.
Below the paywall here is a piece I wrote in 2020. That year’s chicks hatched the same week that the protests for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd were met with police brutality on a scale Chicago had not seen in a long while. For several long days I worked on coverage of the protests with my South SideWeekly colleagues (coverage that later won us a Lisagor Award), taking hourly breaks to check on the ducklings.
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