A mother duck dutifully caring for a brood of 11 ducklings while giant construction equipment roared all around was unlike anything Alastair Bennett had seen in his 22 years as a foreman for Calder Stewart.

“I’ve never seen a duck just sit there,” he told Stuff.co.nz.

“We’ve had excavators round her, we’ve had rollers round her, and she just sat there. We’ve never had anything like this. It was quite funny.”

Bennett said the fearless waterfowl remained for more than a month at the construction site on the corner of Victoria Ave and Bill Richardson Dr near Invercargill’s city centre.

Progressive Energy’s new shop and showroom is expected to open at the site in April.

“We dug around it and left her,” he said.

“She was there for 33 days.”

Along with the family’s stubbornness, workers at the site also observed some quirks in the mother duck’s behaviour, Bennett said.

“She’s a funny one. Every day at four (pm) she’d take off for 30 minutes and come back.”

Work at the site - a roughly 1000 square-metre area slated to become an industrial site - left the family’s nest where it was, working around the family of waterfowl. Bennett said equipment would sometimes come within about a metre of the ducks - yet they never budged under pressure.

Bennett said the family of ducks decided to relocate at the end of November - an undertaking which workers were more than happy to assist them with.

Calder Stewart project manager Haydyn Taylor said he’d also never heard of such a dedicated family of ducks staying in the middle of a construction site.

“The boys did well just working around it,” he said.

“It wasn’t leaving. It was very tenacious.”

Birds New Zealand regional recorder Phil Rhodes said the ducks - which were black with white splotches on their chests - were most likely a cross between a mallard and a domestic duck like an Indian runner duck, a species seen in the 1995 film “Babe”.

“Mallards will mate with just about any duck species,” he said.

Like Bennett and Taylor, Rhodes said it was the first time he had heard of a mother duck caring for her ducklings so dutifully in a construction site.

“Some ducks are just resilient,” he said.

“If they’ve got eggs and ducklings, they’ll just stay with them. She would just take them down to the water if she thought they were in danger.”

While the father neglected his duties, the mother’s parenting skills were to be commended, Rhodes said.

“She didn’t abandon the nest, which is really good,” he said.

“She’s put up with a lot. It just tells you about that maternal instinct.”

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