One of our Pekin ducks has gone broody — but people have managed to sufficiently breed out brooding instinct to what I call “short attention span nesting”. She absolutely needs to sit on a nest. For about 20 minutes, then she’s ready for a swim in the pond or some chow. Which means we wouldn’t trust them to hatch eggs — we’ve got incubators for that. She has, however, figured out a reasonable solution: pinecones. No one takes them from her .She can even leave them out in the yard overnight and the marauding racoon will leave it alone. She built a very convincing nest in our pine trees (and was frantically trying to escape the fence to go sit on the nest) … so Anya relocated it into the duck yard and got the duck over to it. Now she’s got a nest inside the fence to sit on for half an hour and doesn’t seem so compelled to escape.
