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?