hey ducks, newsflash: you can SWIM

Will had a meeting tonight, so we didn’t round up the ducks until after 9.  And when we got to their yard, only one was there.  The other two were quacking across the pond.

I have no idea if there was another attempted attack, or if these two ducks decided to attempt swimming, lost their shit and ended up on the other side of the pond, or maybe they are just f-ing with us at this point.  Either way, we just attempted to herd ducks.  Maybe not the most successful enterprise of all time, but ultimately we managed to get everyone home safe… one Will caught, the other we chased across the pond (in that way that a duck can run-fly across a body of water) and then caught.

Hey ducks, guess what? YOU CAN SWIM.  I swear to God.  That’s sorta what you do.  So let’s try that next time, shall we?

The new bedtime routine

We’ve given up on the ducks’ ability to care for themselves.  Instead of waiting patiently until they learn to use their house, each evening after putting Alston to bed, we head down to catch the three older quacks and stick them in the duck house with the three younger quacklings.  I’m armed with the flashlight, holding open the roof top door, while Will attempts to corner the ducks so he can grab one.  In a vain attempt at helping, I occasionally stick a foot out as a quack runs by, as if to trip him and make him easier to catch.  Turns out, you can’t trip a duck.  The whole ordeal takes about 20 minutes.

At the same time, Alston, in full toddler glory, learned how to catapult out of his crib, resulting in some significant changes to the farm house night routine.  For now, the crib mattress is on the floor, while I wait for the toddler bed guard rail to arrive.  So each night, after the usual bath and story, we’ve added a small battle of wits to the mix.  I get him down on the mattress and exit the room once I see him begin to suck his thumb.  The moment I shut the door, he then leaps out of bed and heads right for the door knob, which I am holding shut from the other side.  Crying ensues, he quits, I put a gate up outside his door and we’re all set…

… until about 3 AM, when he inevitably rolls off the mattress.  The six inch fall is enough to wake him up, so he pays that favor forward to me, and inevitably he ends up in our bed and I sleep with baby feet in my face.  Cute baby feet, but feet nonetheless.  As Will’s been battling (yet another) case of poison Ivy, he’s missed this adventure while shacking up in the guest room where he can itch to his hand’s content.

However, Will has his own bedtime terrors, involving any quack or squawk or unidentifiable animal sound.  So I frequently find him sleeping on the couch when Alston and I head down for breakfast, wearing his long wool coat in lieu of a blanket.

Needless to say, all involved are looking pretty tired these days.

A rough week

Over the past week 6 ducks were killed and at least 8 guineas.  The ducks appear to have been another dog attack, whereas the guineas we suspect raccoons.

Can I take a moment to complain about chicken wire?  It is entirely useless, but for the sole purpose of keeping chickens in.  Dogs can simply push through it and raccoons, it turns out, can tear it like paper with their nimble little hands.  Oh yeah, and they fit through the hog wire and like to rip the wings off the guineas but not actually eat them.  Nature is cruel.

So now the old chicken coop is reinforced with both hog wire on the outside (for the dogs and fox) and rabbit wire on the inside (for everything smaller).  Plus the rail road ties to keep anything from digging.  And we’ve ordered some crazy solar-powered device that emits a blinking red light to make predators think that there is another predator nearby.

Speaking of crazy, Will has nearly lost it.  At the sound of a quack or a chirp he goes tearing downstairs to patrol the property.  He hasn’t had a full night’s sleep all weekend.  I’m beginning to grow concerned.  I expected farming to be hard, but I didn’t expect it to be so stressful.

Guinea and Duckling Update

Let’s start with the quacklings.  Righty’s leg has completely healed and we’ve taken off his (her?) bandage.  The runt is still very small compared to her siblings, but she is growing (at three weeks she’s as big as the others were at one week).  And the other one is normal and boring, which is probably ideal.

The ducklings are still shacking up with the guinea keats in the shed.

And everyone is getting along quite lovely.

As for the guineas, they are feathering up super fast compared to the chickens and ducks.  We did lose another one, unfortunately.  His (her?) breathing was quite odd, so we brought him inside, away from the others in case he was sick.  He made it through the night, but passed later this afternoon.  I’ve been told by other folks who’ve raised guineas that to only be down 2 so far is a good yield for these fragile birds, which is some consolation I suppose.

Next week, we will probably move the ducklings to the duck house and the keats to the old chicken coop.  Will spent today digging a trench around the enclosure to bury hog wire a foot deep and reinforce the entire exterior.  He then went the extra mile and filled the ditch with broken glass and dirt, to further deter any potential predators.  Shy of a bear, I’m pretty confident the birds will now be safe.

Ducks, meet Pond

After a week in their new yard by the pond, the ducks still hadn’t ventured up the ramp and into their lovely new house.  So Friday night, we forced it upon them.  We shut the front doors, opened the roof hatch and placed each panicked waterfowl inside with ample food and water for the night.  The catching part was moderately traumatic, but once inside they settled into the hay for the night.

The next morning, we opened one door and hoped they would use the ramp to get down.  No such luck.  While, at least, they didn’t come tearing out the moment we opened up the house, they all jumped out within 10 minutes, never to return again.

Originally, the plan was to keep them fenced off from the pond until the quacks learned to use their home, but we gave up today.  Hilariously, once the fencing was removed these ducks had no idea what to do, and all 9 have continued to lounge about in their yard so far.  We’ll see what the heck they do tonight.

Our new plan (there’s always a plan), is to move the 3 new ducklings directly into the duck house once they are big enough to leave the shed and heat lamps (another week or two).  After a week holed up in their new home, we’ll open up the doors and see if they know to return to the house.  And then, if we are lucky (which, for the record, we are not), the older ducks will learn from the youngsters and all will happily bed down indoors every night.  And read bedtime stories to each other (what?  that’s no more unreasonable than my assumption that the duck house project wasn’t all for not).

I miss the chickens.

Duckling Update

Good news!  My broken little duckling is doing much better today.  The swelling is almost entirely gone, and while he still has a bit of a limp, he is trying to get around.  I didn’t kill him.  Hurray!

I think gimpy and I are now permanently bonded to one another, what with his injured right leg and my broken left foot.  We are quite the pair.

I broke a duck

This morning, Will was showing our cleaning lady (yes, I’m such a frontier-poser that I have a cleaning lady, but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than marriage counseling) our keats and ducklings, when he noticed that one duckling had a horribly swollen foot.  Turns out, I failed to remove the band from this guy when he arrived two weeks ago, unlike his  siblings.  The poor thing!  It looks like his foot was blown up like a balloon.  Will managed to remove the band, and we bandaged the resulting cut with some Neosporin, gauze and tape, but I’m convinced there is no way this leg is going to heal.  I broke a duckling.  A poor little duckling, who was already a replacement for another duck that got eaten by a fox.  The chickens were a blow, but only indirectly our fault.  I flat out neglected to help this little quack and now he may not make it.  I feel absolutely terrible.
 
It has not been a good week here on the farm.  Not at all.

Welcome to the duck house

Will and his dad built the duck house over the span of two weekends, and then Will and I (okay, mostly Will), painted it.  Today, we wrapped up the final details so we (again, mostly Will) moved the 9 ducks we had rooming with the chickens  to their new home.

I can’t say that the ducks enjoyed the move itself (they scratched up Will’s arms and pooped all over him), but he managed to get them all transferred without any poultry injuries, so mission accomplished.  A Google search told us we could teach (read: lure) the ducks to go into their house by cutting up some tomato and putting it on the ramp and in the back corner of the house.  So far this hasn’t worked, but it’s only been a day so we’ll reassess tomorrow.  I have a feeling the quacks are going to prefer sleeping under this house, too.

Once the ducks figure out that they need to go into their house a night, where we can close them up safely away from any hungry fox, we’ll remove the fencing that’s currently blocking them from the pond.  My thinking is that they need to know where home is, before we give them the freedom to potentially wander off forever.  Of course, this might be as successful as the tomato trick, and I’ll spend my time foraging for duck eggs among the tall grasses and slowly but surely fostering one fat, happy fox.

I keep telling myself other people raise ducks all the time, it can’t be all that hard.  And those, friends, will be words I may be eating instead of pan-seared duck breast.

The nightly routine

If I’m the one on farm chores for the evening, they don’t start until Alston goes to bed, but normally Will heads out to tend to the poultry as I head upstairs for bath time (with Alston asking “bub bath?  bub bath?” the whole way).  Regardless, here’s basically what it looks like.

Grab the compost bucket from the kitchen and head down to the old chicken coop.  Dump out the compost on the pile en route.  Fill the two feeders (we keep the feed in a metal trash can in the enclosure, as we buy it in 50 lb. bags), and collect all the water-ers.  Dump out the remaining dirty water (Will is so good he uses the left overs to water the fig tree we just planted… I just “water” the grass).  Rinse out the two small water-ers ( 1 and 2 Gallon metal inverted jug) and fill them with the hose water in the bucket from the night before.  Place them back in the enclosure, so as not to leave the ducks water-less while the 5 gallon plastic water-ers get cleaned.

Place both the 5 gallon-ers and the empty bucket in the wheel barrow and head up to the house toward the hose.  Clean them out, and fill them and the bucket.  Load everything back into the wheelbarrow and trudge back to the enclosure.  Place one of the water-ers inside, and leave the other outside (so all we have to do in the morning is place it inside, instead of messing with all the schlepping and cleaning while trying to get to work on time).  Leave the bucket and the wheel barrow by the enclosure, so everything is set for the next night.

Head back to the shed and change the water for the keats and ducklings, cleaning everything off in the utility sink in the basement.  Top up their food and watch their cuteness for a moment as you try to ignore just how sweaty you are after water-boy duties in 98% humidity (gotta love the mid atlantic).  Go inside and shower and try to muster the energy to eat dinner.

Total time: 45 minutes.

Meet the ducks

The ducks arrived 2 days after the chickens, the same day the moving truck arrived, so it’s a bit of an understatement when I say the day was a blur.  However, I did manage to get photographic evidence of how much cuter baby quacks are than baby peeps.  Behold:

For lack of planning, we put the ducks in with the chickens in the basement, and they all got along fine.  Especially since we were feeding them both the same food.

Watching the ducks eat is pretty much the best part.  The food is a bit too dry for them (bills vs. beaks), so they run back and forth from the feeder to the water jug, where they do the same sort of slurping thing that wine connoisseurs do when they suck air in over the wine to aerate it (or at least that what it sounds like to me).  The constant parade is adorable.

We stuck with this arrangement for about two weeks, but we started running out of real estate fast.  Ducks grow remarkably quickly, so we moved the quack clan out to the shed where we could make a bigger circle, leaving the chicks in the basement.

At about 3 weeks, even this seemed crowded.  The weather was consistently in the mid nineties, with evenings staying in the seventies, so we decided we could forgo the last week of living under the heat lamps and move them to the old chicken enclosure the previous property owners built from cedars they’d harvested from the woods at the back of the pasture.

We were excited because the ducks are super messy, spilling their water everywhere and making it difficult to keep things clean (and not horribly smelly) in an indoor space.  While catching them was a bit of a traumatic experience for the quacks, they were thrilled to nibble on the fresh green grass and adjusted quickly to life outdoors.  Unfortunately, they refused to put themselves away in the little a-frame coop, preferring instead to sleep underneath it.  Also unfortunate, we failed to notice some holes in the chicken wire, and the second night a fox managed to grab two of the Rouens.  This prompted a trip to Southern States to purchase coyote urine… yes, I said I bought animal urine.  Being a rookie, I had no idea what to get, and I was honestly embarrassed about having to inquire about it, so I got both granular and liquid urine.  That, and some serious patching, seems to have done the trick, as we haven’t lost any other birds since then.

And now, those ducks are huge!