The mallard led her 11 ducklings from the Brown campus, where they hatched Wednesday, to the Providence River.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. � At about the time Brown University students were headed to finals on Wednesday, the eggs that a little mallard duck had been tending in a flower pot near the science library began to hatch.

Brown student Emily Wilkins knew the ducklings were coming. She and some classmates had kept watch to make sure when they hatched they didn�t wander away. She set up a Facebook page, which by Thursday had nearly 1,700 likes.

On Thursday morning, Wilkins and a group of women discovered their own mothering instincts when the mother mallard decided to take her babies to meet their dad.

Wilkins, Brown student Rosa Yu, Sarah Taylor, a teacher and adviser in Brown�s biology department and Science Center, and Beverly Skillings, the department�s program coordinator, held up placards that said �duck x-ing� and simultaneously used them to block the ducklings from going down storm drains or into the street as the mother mallard made a trek through the city to find the father duck.

The trek took the mom and 11 tiny, fuzzy brown ducklings with little yellow spots on their backs through the campus green and down a slope of tall grass near Rhode Island Hall at George and Magee streets, where the ducklings got entangled in the grass and some slipped through a wrought-iron fence.

They continued down George to Benefit Street, past cars that stopped when the women stood in the street with their signs. One mother stopped her car and pulled her child to her front seat so she could see the ducklings.

Wilkins said it�s like Robert McCloskey�s �Make Way for Ducklings,� a children�s book about a pair of mallards that decide to raise the family at the Boston Public Gardens.

PHOTOS:

Make Way for Brown's Ducklings

The women let the mother duck lead the way, except when she tried to go into someone�s backyard on a deep incline with big granite steps.

Taylor says, typically, the male will depart to stake out a territory and the female, once the eggs have hatched, will try to rejoin him.

�If you try to move them, the female may get disoriented. There is a big risk of abandonment,� she said.

Skillings said she didn�t think the ducks had much chance with so much attention and activity in the city, so there she was in the streets with them, holding up a placard and explaining to people in cars why they couldn�t go down the road.

�It�s amazing how they can � make their way with so much interference,� she said. �Their instinct is extraordinary.�

The mallard led her ducklings and the women to South Main Street, past the Licht Judicial Complex and the World War II Monument to the Providence River.

And there at the river sitting on a wall in the sun was dad. Skillings jumped up and down with joy.

�I can�t believe this,� she said. �It�s like a miracle.�

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First published at 10:32 a.m. and updated at 11:56 p.m.