Quackers Hatches a Clutch of Ducklings

After the incident with the opossum, the kindly woman put a big cage in the garden with a swinging door. The door had a hook on it to lock it up. Inside it, she placed nice, clean straw, and used some boards to make a roof. The woman moved Quackers’ nest into the cage. Each night, the woman would lock Quackers into the cage. Each morning, the woman would open the door wide so that Quackers was free to roam. Quackers felt grateful for a safe place to sleep at night. She gladly rearranged her nest to her own satisfaction inside that cage, and continued sitting on her eggs.

One day, Quackers felt a strange movement under her belly. She rose up to take a peek. A tiny little beak tipped with an egg tooth had chipped its way through a crack in one egg. Quackers licked the tiny beak and sat back down again. She could feel the little infant chick slowly chipping its way out of the egg. It was an exhausting task for the chick. After a while, the other eggs began to crack. By mid afternoon, eight baby duck chicks had freed themselves from their eggs.

At first the babies were smoky black and all wet. Quackers removed the broken egg shards from her nest and licked each baby clean as best she could. Before long, Quackers was sitting on a nest full of fuzzy charcoal gray chicks chirping up a racket. How proud she was of her adorable family. She didn’t care that her Pekin feathers were pure white and her chicks were a different color. They were hers! Her dream had come true. Life was good!