At about 10:20 CDT on Thursday June 5th the hooded merganser called her ducklings to follow her out into the world. There were 8 merganser and 6 wood duck ducklings.

One of the ducklings was very late getting out of the nest box, but finally it jumped out and found its way down to the creek many minutes after the family had left the area. It was joined by another little wood duck that got separated from the group somehow. They peeped loudly and tried to swim upstream but the current was strong and they weren’t sure where to go.

The mother duck led her family back and forth upstream for a while, then eventually went downstream past the place where the two were stranded. We saw one of the ducklings join in. Maybe the other one did too.

After a last look back, …

… the family went downstream. There are some wide quiet places and eventually a lake in that direction. We almost never see them again. (22 second video)

I meant to also mention: I’ve turned on the chat feature that let’s you ask questions or make comments and I can respond.

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The west nest camera failed yesterday and overnight: extremely blurry image. Then the outdoor camera stopped working this morning with constant buffering. Both are now swapped out and both views now seem to be okay. Kind of a scramble!

The momma duck is off having some breakfast as of 8:50am CDT.

I wish these ducklings had more respect for us viewers and would hatch overnight as any polite and considerate batch of ducklings would do! But they’re mostly out now at 4:00pm CDT and looking very active and strong. I’ve seen at least one egg that is still hatching and at least one that probably won’t. This is starting to seem like a repeat of the East nest 2 weeks ago when all of us watched for a whole day because they might go, but then they didn’t and stayed overnight again and jumped very early the next morning.

Ducklings need about 20 hours or so in the nest box to get strong enough to leave. So doing the math: afternoon + 20 says it could be late tomorrow morning (or maybe not so late? see the “about” and “or so” in the previous sentence). Only momma duck knows and she hasn’t decided yet.

I can say with complete confidence that they will jump either tomorrow or Friday. Sorry. Best I can do with ducklings that hatch during the day. I’m sending this to let you know that I don’t know!

Some of you probably saw me cleaning the lenses and resetting the camera a short time ago. I don’t know why the color image is so hazy. For now I’ve set it to stay in grayscale mode.

I’m going to enable the outdoor camera for you to see.

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This morning after a quick look at an egg or two as the duck moved momentarily, it looked like several were hatching … and they are. By late today/tonight there should be lots of little ducks. However when she left for breakfast a half hour ago I opened the nest box, moved the shavings aside, and found that many of the eggs are not as far along . I now expect they will hatch today and into this evening/overnight, which means they won’t be ready to go tomorrow morning as I previously suggested. I should just stop doing that! But I’ll do it again anyway: I think they’ll be ready to leave Friday morning.

As I gently rotated some of the eggs in-place to get the photo below the little ducks inside them made tiny peep peep sounds. They talk to their mother and she talks back before they hatch.