Ducks outside

Baby ducks grow at an astonishing rate.  They came to us at about 1.5 ounces, and now they’re over 10 ounces – at just over 2 weeks old. 

These pictures are from when they were about a week old, though, so they’re much bigger than this now!

Here they are in their holding pen as we were cleaning out their usual habitat.  They actually don’t fit in this box any more – they jump out fairly easily.  We (and by we, I mean Michael and I) are not interested in having baby ducks roam the house at will, because part of growing means eating a LOT, and part of eating a LOT means pooping a LOT.  Not something one wants on one’s floors.  So…we had to graduate them to a larger box for cleaning out their habitat.

We hand-feed them a certain amount of green stuff in order to keep them tame and happy with people.  They LOVE green peas.  It’s very funny.  Of course, this means that any time I reach in to do anything with them, even if it’s just to clean something out, they expect to get food.  They try to eat my wedding band, but that hasn’t been successful.

Their first foray into the great outdoors was highly successful.  We put them in one of the garden beds to hunt around for things.  At first they were bewildered and a bit panicky, but they quickly settled down to hunting green things and spiders.  Then the kids found a few small slugs, and those were highly popular. 

They’re really, really cute.  Of course, they’re big enough now that this particular garden bed won’t hold them any more.  That’s okay, though, because I’ve also planted a whole bunch of tomato plants in it, so they would have a much harder time wending their way through it. 

A few days later we took them out again, this time on the grass.  (Astonishing how different this picture is from the one above it – you can see that their beaks are elongating and their necks are getting longer – did I mention they grow at a crazy rate?)  Ducks like to eat grass, so they were pretty happy with this extremely makeshift enclosure, after their initial craziness at being in a new, outside place subsided. 

Dandelion greens are delicious, too.  They didn’t go for the flower so much.  That’s all right.  We have rabbits that eat dandelion flowers. 

The in-town cousins were visiting us that day and all the kids had a great time hunting for slugs for them.  Boadicea learned VERY quickly that when the small humans come with a piece of bark, it holds good things to eat.  The others took a few times to clue in, but Cleopatra and Ghirardelli both caught on finally.  Dilettante never did figure out the slugs, preferring to run around peeping than to pay attention to her flockmates and their snacks.  But I have hope that she’ll eventually figure it out, too.  The kids also found some small snails, and since I’d read that ducks will eat snails, I told them to try it out.  They DO eat snails, shells and all, which was both shocking and gratifying.  Good calcium, I guess?

We had someone on constant guard duty out there, because the ducklings aren’t big enough to fend for themselves, and even crows could carry them off, if the crow was determined.  At one point when the kids returned from a slug hunt, Simeon pointed up at the sky and shouted, “BIRD OF PREY!!!!”  It was a bald eagle, circling in the sky above our house.  Naomi started panicking and wanted to immediately bring the ducklings inside.  I convinced them that if we were there it was highly unlikely that an eagle would carry off the ducklings, and it turned out I was right. 

The ducks will go to live outside in a few weeks, when their feathers are in and they’re big enough to know when to run for cover from birds of prey and not get carried off by crows. 

Next week their oil glands should be fully functional, so we can start letting them have a swim here and there.