Archive for August 28th, 2009
Dupdate
Duck Update
- They’ve finally gone to the top of the garden and away from the house, we can finally have the windows open on hot days without the smell of ducks filling the kitchen. The other good thing about this is that the ducks are now on slabs and not wallowing in mud. The white ducks are white again. This happend because I spent £100 to hire a digger with which I then mostly levelled the garden with.
- About three days before we went to Budapest we were woken up at about half one by the ducks quacking loudly from the other end of the garden – I dismissed it as the two white male ducks fighting again and went back to sleep but Paula jumped out of bed and ran to the top of the garden. When she got to the top of the garden she opened the lid to the ducks and a fox jumped out and ran off. It seems that a fox had gotten into their pen through a piece of chick-wire we hadn’t put enough zip-ties on. It’s a good job Paula got out there when she did else I think all of them would have been killed and taken away. It turned out that five of them had suffered injuries with the white ones being worst off with bite marks on their necks and damaged wings. The white ones looked sad for a while and Paula gave them special treatment the next day letting them use the bath and spraying their cuts with TCP. They are all well & happy now and when our <pigeon serial killing> cat stalks past their pen on her walk abouts the odd duck out (Jack) flaps it’s wings quacking at her and chases her of (I think she’s freightend of the ducks – stupid pusscat.) Of note, the only duck that wasn’t bitten by the fox was Jack (he/she’s the duck with the odd markings,) I can’t help but think that Jack was the duck that maybe kept the fox at bay for the five minutes that the fox spent inside the cage?? Apologies for the lack of photos to sit, I didn’t think to take any
- We brought six ducklings in total from Melton Farmers Market and to be honest I expected them to all be males because I couldn’t imagine why anyone would flog ‘em on otherwise. But it’s become obvious that they were not all males. Both of the white ducks have their feather tail curls so they are 100% male. Out of the three Khaki Campbells only one of them is a male with a tail curl, the other two have been clearly identified as female by the black feather on their wings. This is fantastic news as it means we have a set of ducks for mating and laying eggs – both of which they can’t be far off doing. It does mean that the white ducks will be destined for Christmas dinner because if we have too many males they will end up fighting or killing the females (who every said too much sex is a bad thing?) The only conundrum left is we have no idea what sex Jack is…. We don’t even know what breed it is so we can’t find out what the identifying signs are. It’s not got the curly feather so we are banking on it being a girl so far, but it was always the runt duckling so maybe it’s not quite matured yet?
- We have been incubating our own duck eggs Paula brought from the internet and today they finally hatched. The next time I post will be about that no doubt.
He works full time in IT and spends his evenings feeding the farm that is his home has become. Mark loves playing Ultimate every now and again, toying with his camera and has just started scuba diving.
