MOM ON THE RUN: Duck egg offers family hope

My son and I are huddled in the downstairs bathroom together, lights off, holding a flashlight up to the duck egg, trying to see what’s inside. “What do you think?” I ask him. “I don’t know,” he answers back in hushed tones. Being in the dark makes us whisper.

“Well, that there … that looks like something solid,” I point to a mass on the side of the egg. “And there are those bubbles I saw last time.” “Yeah,” he says. We look some more, in silence, until finally I click the flashlight off and the bathroom light on. “I’m just not sure,” I pronounce. “We’ll give it a few more days.“

Back outside the bathroom, my daughter’s boyfriend looks at us hopefully. “Is it growing?” “Mrs. Hypes said there’s no way it’s going to hatch,” my daughter offers gloomily. I had asked her to check with her high school biology teacher for an incubator, advice, anything.

And that gloomy forecast reinforces us. “Well, we’re going to try!” my son says. Then, quietly, “I’d love for it to hatch.” “Me too,” I tell him, though I know the odds are against it.
I found the duck egg lying next to a driveway on one of my 6 a.m. dog walks. The mama duck was standing next to it, and she fluttered away when my dogs got close. I stood and looked at the egg for a minute — we were pretty far from where the mallard family lives, and I couldn’t imagine her laying an egg here, nowhere near a nest, so close to the busy public. It seemed pretty apparent that something — a fox? We do have them in our neighborhood — had swiped the egg from the nest and deposited it next to the driveway. Nothing good would come of it there by the street, I decided, so I tucked it into my pocket — ooh, slimy! — and took it home.

At home, I installed it in our lizard terrarium, the closest I could come to an incubator. Online research revealed that duck egg incubators are kept at 95 to 100 degrees, and the terrarium is only 85, so I half-buried it in the sand over the under-tank heater, which is much warmer than the rest of the terrarium. And, worried about the big bearded dragon already living in the tank, I covered the whole thing with my pink fleece hat. It was what was handy at the moment.

So now it’s a week later. Per various Web sites, I’ve been turning the egg every few hours — an uneven number of times per day, so it rests on a different side each night — and misting it with water occasionally, since it’s not a humidified terrarium. And we’re candling every few days, looking for the little veins the duckling Web site claims are the harbinger of a growing baby duck.

“What are you going to do with a baby duck?” my husband asked my son. He’s lived with a menagerie for years, and is making no assumptions that the egg won’t survive. “It would be so cool!” my son says. “Feed him, get him big and strong, then deliver him to the pond,” I tell my husband. “The other ducklings will have hatched about then, maybe the mother won’t notice an extra.” “Ah,” my husband said, then went back to his crossword puzzle. “Certain doom,” he’s thinking, I know.

He’s probably right, but still, my son and I are making plans. “I’m going to put the little red colander over the egg when it’s about time to hatch,” I told him. “So he doesn’t get eaten, in case we’re not there.” “Man, he’s going to be so cute,” my son says.

And sure, the odds are very low, we know that. Colanders and sand and weak flashlights are kind of silly. But still, carefully we put the egg back, cover it with the pink hat, and we hope.

Lianne Wilkens lives with her family in Manassas. She can be reached at liannewilkens@hotmail.com.