Wood Duck Duckling Fiasco

A follow up to this morning’s post. This video is sped up 8x’s actual speed to save time. You will see the first 9 ducklings jump from the nest box without momma duck. This happened to me only once before, but as soon as that duckling left, momma blasted out of the box in a panic and THEN the rest of the ducklings followed. This time, there were three ducklings that hatched after the first nine and were not quite ready to make the leap of faith, so momma chose to stay with them instead of leaving the nest. These three, and the three eggs that did not hatch were most likely from a dumper hen. A hen will lay one egg per day (10-12) and when she is done, will start to incubate them so they all hatch at the same time. Egg-dumpers, or "intraspecific brood parasitism" is common in wood ducks. This is when a female visits other wood duck cavities, lay eggs in them, and leave them to be raised by the original female. If this happens AFTER the original hen has started to incubate, these dumper eggs will not hatch at the same time, hence what we witnessed here.
The original nine ducklings ran around my backyard, calling loudly for momma, for about an hour before they went through the chain-link fence and into the woods. At that point, they went silent, and I never saw them again. Meanwhile, momma duck took a nap with the three ducklings in the box. It was getting too hot for me to stay in the blind, so I went back into my house.
Later in the afternoon, momma left for water/food and returned several hours later. She then left a second time. The second time she left, she flew to several trees around the nest box, at various heights, calling, before returning to the nest box.
At 5:45 pm, she scanned the area several times before finally jumping out of the box and started calling to the three ducklings. Without hesitation, they took the leap of faith and joined momma on the ground. I stayed inside the house as I did not want to spook them. I was not able to get a good look on the ground from my advantage point, but I believe the erratic behavior of flying around to different trees might have been momma duck gathering the other ducklings so they can all go off to the river together.
This was certainly a different and exciting wood duck nesting season. I hope you all enjoyed it and thank you for following along!