17-5-2016 OLIVA MARJAL - MALLARD (JUVENILE) (Anas platyrhynchos)

A female mallard lays up to a dozen eggs in nests on the ground near water, often in a small depression or tree hole. She lines the nest with warm down plucked from her undercoat. Soon after birth, baby ducks, called ducklings, open their eyes. A little more than a day after hatching, ducklings can run, swim, and forage for food on their own. They stay in the nest for less than a month. A group of ducklings is called a brood. Outside the nest, the brood sticks close by the mother for safety, often following behind her in a neat, single-file line.

Once hatched, the ducklings will stay in the nest for at least 10 hours while they dry and get used to using their legs. Then, usually in the early morning, the female leads them to water. Bad weather may delay this, but the sooner the ducklings get to water to feed, the better their chances of survival.

Baby ducklings are ready to go within a few hours after they hatch. They can swim, waddle, feed themselves, and find food right away. Their mother will watch over them and help protect them for the next few months. After around two months, the ducklings can fly and will become independent.

Incubation and rearing take prodigious effort and sacrifice. Once the clutch is complete, the female remains on the nest for nearly 23 hours a day, with two short breaks – usually one before 9am and the other after 4pm. Every half an hour or so, day or night, she shifts position to ensure all eggs are covered. She plucks downy feathers from her breast to create an ‘incubation patch’ to keep the eggs close to her skin at a steady 37.5°C, and sits patiently for some 28 days, forever aware of danger.

Her burden doesn’t reduce when the eggs hatch. Now there are between six and 13 highly mobile ducklings to care for, each capable of running and feeding themselves within a few hours. The female quickly leads them to water; in these first fraught hours she may call 200 times a minute.

Alarm calls summon the brood to regroup, while the female may also distract potential predators with a broken-wing display. Even so, losses are high. It can be 50 more days before the young are self-sufficient, and thankfully the females can lay up to four clutches a year.

Females sometimes test the mettle of their mates by suddenly taking off and expecting the male to follow. Rivals often join these flights of one female and several males.

If you hear incessant loud quacking from a female in early spring, this might be part of a nest-site assessment. It is thought the calls serve to attract predators, which then betray their presence and allow cautious birds to abandon a ‘high risk’ nest site.

For various reasons, females don’t always lead their ducklings to the nearest pond. Indeed, they might well change ponds frequently if the mother isn’t satisfied with things. That’s why you so often see parties of ducklings ‘commuting’.