I’m visiting my parents for the weekend and they live on a farm. We have a duck that’s a different breed from all our other ducks, and none of the drakes will mate with her. Nevertheless, she still makes nests and sets on them, guarding them fanatically and attacking anything that gets near. It’s to my mother’s chagrin that our nesting ducks always find their ideal nesting spots in flower beds, “ideal” of course being from the ducks’ perspective, not my mother’s.
So back to this one lonely duck. She’s got a nest right now, in a flower bed, naturally, but there’s nothing odd about that, at least around here. There’s a regular chicken nest next to it, also in the flower bed, in which our hens lay and we confiscate their eggs ’cause they’re good eatin’. Well, Mom noticed for a few days she wasn’t getting any more eggs from the hens’ nest. She chalked it up to the hens getting tired of one particular nest, that they’d moved production to a different location, and didn’t think any more of it. Then one day she noticed the tip of a chicken egg poking out of our duck’s nest. That thieving duck was rolling the hen eggs into her nest! Now, to be fair, the duck probably isn’t bright enough to differentiate between chicken eggs and duck eggs, so when she saw an egg sitting around, she just assumed she’d lost one of her own. At least that’s my guess; it’s kind of hard to fathom the mind of a duck.
So Mom has gotten used to prizing any chicken eggs she sees from the duck’s nest, much to the duck’s disturbance because she has to furiously attack the stick or whatever tool Mom is using, since it’s stealing “her” eggs. The duck can’t stay on her nest all the time, though; she gets off to eat and to take a bath in the pond. When she leaves her nest is when the real fun begins, because that nest doesn’t go to waste, oh no. The hens that normally lay their eggs in the chicken nest adjacent get confused when they see one nest, void of eggs save a couple we keep there as incentive for them to lay more, and another big, cushy nest (duck down is very soft) filled to the brim with eggs. So they lay in the duck nest.
Now, imagine being a hen. You come bebopping along, on the lookout for juicy-looking bugs in the grass, when the urge to lay an egg hits you. Oooo-wee, you have just got to lay an egg before you crap your… rear feathers? (Chickens don’t wear pants, sadly. It’d be a much funnier world if they did.) You look around for the closest nest and see two options: old reliable, made soft for your bottom only by twigs and dead flower stalks, or the fancy deluxe nest, cushioned with duck down out the wazoo. However, the fancy deluxe nest is already occupied by that stupid red hen that you’ve never liked anyway, the girl always stole the best morsels of corn right from under your beak at feeding time, which is just like a Rhode Island Red… Anyway, so what’s a good chicken to do? Do you opt for the uncomfortable and barren nest, or do you muscle your way onto the deluxe nest?
I’ll tell you what they do: they shove each other around and both use the nest… At the same time. Mom explained this part to me: she said two hens would get on the duck nest at the same time and just sit there, facing the same direction, and casting shifty glances at each other the whole time. I don’t know what they worry the other would do, claim both eggs as her own to the other chickens? I thought this was hilarious enough, but apparently those old hens can’t even wait long enough for the duck to vacate the premises, as evidenced by this photo my dad took:
A nesting duck on the left with a chicken trying to lay an egg on the right.
I guess our duck is more trusting of the hens than of some intruding stick. Then again, maybe she realizes the chicken is only adding to her clutch of eggs, or maybe she just appreciates having the extra girth to keep her eggs warm.