Baby Ducklings - 1 day old

The baby ducklings wandered out side their nest today, for the first time, they oldest of them would be about 24 hours old now.

In the picture below, you can see that there are 12 baby ducklings, the mother (Crystal), and a few eggs, so there still may be more ducklings.

Crystal and 12 of her ducklings

There is another duckling that is not in the picture, that we helped out of the shell, it appeared that it was having problems. They had broken their shell, but did not seem to be able to get out of the shell. So we helped them out of the shell, and put it back in the nest, the mother has been sitting on them since - so we can not tell how they are going.

We do not expect that Crystal will leave the nest again today, so we will have to wait until tomorrow to see if this one survived or if there will be more ducklings. We do not expect that there will be any more, although about 5 of the eggs remaining are showing signs of having ducklings inside them - you can see the darkened shape of the duckling through the egg.

It is interesting that when the ducklings are outside the nest, the mother keeps making small noises, as if to say "I am here still" or "this way home".

We have just spent about 20 minutes watching the ducklings, as they have started eating and drinking and it is a warm feeling watching them see the world for the first time. The ducklings also seem to be curious about Thistle (another mother duck sitting on eggs) - which is in the pen with them and the ducklings will go and look at Thistle and sit outside her nest and watch her.

I picked up one of the baby ones, and it is amazing how soft and warm they are, the mother was getting a little upset, so I returned the baby to her.