Wonderful little story. The tune "twinkle..." needs tweaking to fit; no reason to straight-jacket it, or the repeat could be used.

I seem to remember a little story or rhyme in a children's book that I had in the 1930s (some of these books were old then, my father's, retrieved from the basement). But the idea of a chicken hatching duck eggs and her confusion when the ducklings took to water may have been thought of independently more than once.

Agriculture Canada (poultry pub. 1524 on managing a small flock) has a paragraph on using chickens to hatch waterfowl eggs. It cautions one to wet the eggs once a day with lukewarm water.