Wednesday, May 23, 2007

We have guests!

Earlier this spring, a pair of ducks built a nest in the rocks on our shoreline of the Maumee Bay. This thrilled my husband, who loves all things in nature, especially creatures (except groundhogs - lol). However, it was clear that they'd abandoned their nest a couple of weeks ago, even though they were still hanging around. Hubby had hoped that they'd found a safer place to build a nest and lay their eggs - and it turns out, he was right.

As we looked through our vegetable garden last night, we discovered their 'safer place' was under our sage plant in the corner of our garden. The nest is situated between the sage and the chicken wire we put up to keep our recycled leaves inside the garden. There are eight eggs in the nest - and this pretty much explains why we kept seeing the papa duck waddling around inside the garden.

Of course, this does present a problem for us because there's no way to plant our squash, tomatoes or broccoli without seriously disturbing this nest or causing it to be abandoned. If you look closely at this second photo, you can see the white of the eggs near the bottom center of the garden. I don't think we'd even be able to pull out the chicken wire without disturbing the nest. So it appears that we're either going to find a new place for our tomatoes this year, foregoing all the other veggies - or forego our own garden entirely. But this seems a small price to pay for the pleasure of having baby ducks and watching them grow.

You don't think they'll come back next year, do you?

8 comments:

-Sepp said...

After mamma is sitting on the eggs, you'll be able to plant your garden as long as you stay away from the bush as if you don't notice them or run a roto tiller for the garden. Want them to come back every year? Feed 'em!

Maggie said...

I DON'T want them to come back to the GARDEN...but I wouldn't mind them around the yard...

We will not be feeding them. lol

But you can see all our old leaves in the planting area and we need to fertilize and turn them over...we also need to pull up some herbs that have taken over the other side...maybe we can clear the opposite half?

Chad said...

You might poison them w/ chems. Birds are funny, they don't like their nests disrupted. It's a chance you can take to clear around them, but stay as far as you can from the nest area. Soon, they will leave and you can get rid of the nest and in the fall, cover the whole area in that black webbing from the garden centers. It will keep the ground soft and clear of late season weeds etc. If it were me, after they've gone, I'd carefully relocate the nest to a spot you can live with..and maybe next year they will find it and set up shop again:)

Unknown said...

You really didn't have time to do all of that work tending a garden right now anyway...or at least that's what the ducks are telling you.

:-)

SensorG said...

I'd like to point out that duck and sage go really well together. :)

Maggie said...

SensorG - I'm almost ashamed to admit that the thought had crossed my mind...lol

SensorG said...

Come on Maggie... you're a Republican, you own a gun.

Have yourself a nice dinner. lol

Hooda Thunkit (Dave Zawodny) said...

Cold sensorg, cold...

Czarnina had crossed my mind though ;-)

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