Ducks Have No Lips Part Two

Hey!

So we are, hopefully, going to have 20 ducks by the time this is all said and done.  Because both sets are straight runs (you get what you get in terms of male and female), I see some rehoming in our future (let me know if you might want a drake.  :D ).  You have to be careful about the balance of males to females because the males will overmate the females and kill them.

We don't have a fence and that is a bit of a concern, but we do have an acre pond. We are hoping that, by putting the ducks on the pond at night, they will be more protected from predators.  If not, we will have to come up with a plan B.

TWS has already built two duck habitats.  One of them is just a floating platform with ramps so the ducks can get up into them.  The second is a floating duck chiki with a roof, no walls, but with a nifty solar powered light.  It freaked the mess out of the dog the first time he saw this glowing THING on the water!  They are both anchored with old tires that are bolted together and are partially filled with concrete.  We needed some underwater habitat for fish anyway since our pond is flat and featureless on the bottom of it.

TWS will also build two actual floating duck houses.  These will (hopefully!) be where the ducks nest.  Each platform will have a "box" with four openings and inner walls.  These two houses will be attached to a cable that we can pull on shore to fetch the eggs (though, to be honest, I find the idea of paddling out in my canoe to get eggs to be fabulous!). 

Here is a picture of the Duck Chiki.  You can see the copper cap and the black solar receptor on the top, plus the walking ramps.

Solar Light

 This is the anchor that keeps the platform and chiki from floating too far.  It was a very delicate operation to float the anchor into the middle of the pond using a canoe and the flat platform!

Testing Duckling Videos

Just wanted to see if this video posted :)

Ducks Have No Lips Part One

Good Morning!

We have added a new facet to our diamond-in-the-rough farm:  ducks!

I wish I could say that we decided to add ducks because it was a prudent and reasonable thing to do, something we had researched thoroughly and wrote out a plan for, knowing it was going to contribute income and to our farm, etc, etc, etc.

Eh...the truth is that I have a pond and the pond looked like it needed ducks on it.  A pond with no ducks is pretty.  A pond with ducks is pretty AND happy.  I'm greedy; I wanted both :D.

Thankfully The Wonder Sweetie was too distracted to think it through swayed by my brilliant idea and ordered ducklings for me for my birthday.  Originally it was going to be about 3 ducks.  But then you need spares (farm life realities) which makes it 6.  Then you have minimum orders which brings you up to 10.  But then that is just an awkward number for some reason, so it became 14, which became 16 for reasons I am not sure of.  So, 16 ducks are now on order.

However, my ordered ducklings would not arrive until May and this was sometime in February/March.  That is a REALLY long time.  Like, WEEKS.

So I thought "Hmm....ok how about we get a couple of local, feed store ducklings, y'know, just to practice with, to make sure we know what we are doing (we don't, btw).".  So we pestered our favorite locally owned feed and seed for a few weeks, but they didn't get any in.  Our local Tractor Supply Co store had had Rouens, but they were sold out.  Another TSC nearby did not carry any, and another one only had Mallards (which migrate.  I wanted "all year round" ducks).  Eventually we found a TSC that had Pekins (PekIN, not PekING--Peking Duck is the meal you make with Pekin Ducks :) ).  After a lovely drive in the country to a town we had not visited before, we came home with four itty bitty, cute as a button Pekin ducklings that all fit in a little box.

Can I tell you how thankful to the Lord I am that we decided to do a trial run with just four ducklings???  Holy Moley what a learning curve!  Some things we learned:
-Ducks grow FAST
-Ducks don't get feathers as fast as they grow.  This means that they can be as large as a relatively well proportioned housecat who may on occasion terrorize a certain dog, but STILL can't regulate their own temps enough to be outside without heat.
-Housecat sized ducks do not fit in a homemade chicken brooder for very long.
-Ducks smell.  Ok, the ducks themselves do not smell, and actually their poo is not too bad.  What DOES smell is the water and poo soaked shavings around the waterer.  Ducks make a HUGE mess of water.  They have to drink water when they have a mouth of food or they can choke. 
-Ducks have no lips.  When they drink water, it literally squirts out of both sides of the back of their bills.  This means they get water EVERYWHERE, including on the shavings.  We have to refill their waterer several times a day.  The water/food/shaving/poo mixture really starts to smell.  This means cleaning out the brooder (when they were in it all day) at least once, sometimes twice a day as they grew.

Thank the Good Lord our weather is changing to actual spring.  We have passed the blueberry winter and the dogwood winter, and hopefully will skip the blackberry winter this year (These are names of cold snaps that seem to hit when the blueberries, dogwoods, and blackberries bloom).  The huge ducklings spend their days outside in a wire dog pen, and just come into the brooder, which is now on the screened porch, to sleep.

In fact, today we are going to move them to one of the chicken runs today that has a plug for the brooder (which is now on blocks so they can sort of fit under it).  More pics to come!

Part Two coming soon!....