Local News in Brief : Newport Beach : Duck Abandons Eggs After Holding Up Job

A mother duck that construction workers had gingerly walked around after she laid more than 10 eggs in an unfinished Newport Beach shipyard has abandoned her nest.

“She deserted,” said a disappointed Brian Martin, the maintenance worker who discovered the nest in mid-March.

Construction at the Mariner’s Mile Marine Center, a boat maintenance and office complex on Coast Highway, had been delayed because workers wanted to leave an opening for the duck, found on her pile of eggs under the floorboards of an uncompleted dock.

Cathy Mayfield, a secretary at the center, said workers noticed that the duck had left a week ago, but “everybody was waiting for her to come back.”

Armed with a flashlight and a box of towels, she tried to salvage the six remaining eggs for incubation Friday night, but “the insides looked like muck,” she said.

“Thelma,” as the duck was nicknamed, periodically had been dropping cracked and rotten eggs into the water beginning earlier this month.

“She’d peek her head up between the docks with the eggs in her beak and throw them over,” Mayfield said.

“I wish she would have had them,” Martin said. “It would’ve been fun--we’d have had a little celebration, of course.”