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player ready...Many measure spring’s arrival with their first robin sighting of the year. At the Wal-Mart along Illinois Highway 83 in Villa Park, the staff knows the season of regeneration is here when a wild mallard female duck abandons a nearby pond and, being “in the family way,” waddles into their store looking for a place to nest.
After three years of claiming some portion of the store’s outdoor garden display section as her personal maternity ward, the presumptuous brown-striped bird has been dubbed by clerks simply “Ms. Duck.”
Not that anybody has objected to her presence. This year, she has been on a table incubating eggs in a flat of square plastic pots of caladium, a decorative plant with broad green leaves. Last year, she was in the tulips. The year before, she was in the hosta, another big, leafy decorative plant.
“We’ll let her sit here as long as she needs,” says Joan Brown, the garden department manager. “Everybody in the store loves her and brings her food. We sell plenty of caladium around her, but we don’t let anybody disturb her or the pots she’s on.”
Ms. Duck, Brown says, usually shows up around early May, shortly after the store opens its outdoor garden area, set up with row upon row of plants and gardening equipment.
“She just appears one day and starts waddling up and down the aisles, real friendly like, examining all the nooks and crannies like she owns the place,” Brown says.
“She’ll take her time, maybe a couple of weeks. Then one morning we’ll come in and find her sitting on a batch of eggs she’s laid. She’ll sit right there on top of them until they hatch. That might take five weeks.”
Actually, say wildlife experts, mallard ducks incubate their eggs for 26 days. Brown estimates Ms. Duck laid her eggs this year about three weeks ago, which means her ducklings may hatch this week.
The duck may have been too clever by half this year when she chose to nest in the caladium. The plant’s leaves, so thick and broad she and the nest are easily hidden under them, are a tasty treat to a duck.
“At first, we didn’t know where she had nested because we couldn’t see her,” Brown says. “But she likes eating the leaves so much, her hiding place was soon lost.”
Though the duck is now exposed, her coloring makes her hard to spot, especially since she never makes much sound and often barely moves.
“A lot of people think she’s a fake ornament,” says A.J. Gallagher, one of Ms. Duck’s clerk-overseers. “Some of them try to touch her or pick her up.
“We’re always around to stop that. We’ve put up signs not to touch her, but not everybody reads them. We don’t mind people looking at her, but we don’t want them to touch her or disturb her.”
Most every employee in the store has adopted the duck, bringing her grain, lettuce and bread to eat, keeping a Styrofoam cup near her nest filled with water. A couple of times a day, when she needs a break, she gets up and flies off for a half-hour or so. Clerks are always around to keep an eye on the eggs.
She apparently flies only a few hundred feet to her home pond in a private yard adjacent to the rear of the store.
“Usually mallard females are concerned about nesting in a place well-hidden from predators that will threaten her eggs and ducklings,” says naturalist Carl Strang of the Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn.
“That sounds like what probably happened with this duck. She found a place that proved to be safe, so she’ll keep going back there every year.”
Once the ducklings hatch, they will stay in the store a short while. A couple of days after hatching, they’ll be shooed from the nest by their mother, intent on getting them to water. They’ll hop off the table and follow Ms. Duck out the door and over a berm that separates the store from the pond.
Then, the staff will take down the signs and pack away the Wal-Mart employee ID tag they made for her. It says, “Ms. Duck,” further identifying her as a “new associate.”
Actually, after three years, Ms. Duck has been in the gardening department longer than Brown and everybody else there. With that kind of seniority, she may be eligible for maternity benefits.
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