Our sweet little Dilly Duck has developed quite the attitude. It took us the better part of a week to put together all of the pieces and realize that Dilly is feeling broody.

Each day, after Paul collects the eggs, Dilly sits alone in the corner of the yard; it’s pitiful. When Paul checks on their food and water, Dilly becomes very aggressive, bitching up a storm at him.

Dilly’s natural instincts are kicking in. She knows she should be sitting on the eggs, but I’m not sure she understands why. With no drake, the eggs aren’t fertile. Yet, she tries very hard to protect them and we are upsetting her by taking the eggs away.

This afternoon we visited friends who have a pair of Mallard ducks -?Daffy and Daisy.

Daffy was irate at how close we were getting to his girl. He kept flying at us as if trying to scare us off.

While Daisy is not a very prolific egg layer, she’s not broody either, so we adopted a couple of her eggs for Dilly. We brought our precious cargo home where Hannah marked the eggs so we’d be sure not to remove these from Dilly’s nest.

I’m not sure what Dilly will think when she takes a closer look at these babies. If she keeps to task, in 28 days or so we could have a couple new babies on the farm!