We have had the ducklings

We have had the ducklings for ten days or so now and they’re about three weeks old. At night they live in a tub in the spare room lined with newspaper and straw, and in the mornings we put them out into the enclosed duck-pen. It’s incredible how smelly four little ducks can make a room in twelve hours. They’re eating chick starter feed and getting through not as much water as I’d have expected given the heat. During the day they huddle in their little group in the shade with occasional forays – all together – to their drinking water or their feed. They move as one. They rootle in the grass and I’ve seen them catching bugs and insects. Good ducklings. They are just about big enough now to poke their beaks over the edge of the washing-up bowl that serves as the big duck’s bath, and they’re trying to drink from that but without a great deal of success.

In all, they are very very cute indeed but I hope they can live outside soon as the moving them to and fro every morning and evening is a pain and so is the smell. This all depends on the big duck now – we have put her in the pen a few times together with the ducklings to try to get them used to each other, and she hasn’t actually attacked them, but she’s not very happy being with them and paces up and down along the wire like a caged, er, duck. I’d never have thought a duck could pace, but she is definitely pacing. This is a duck we’ve had for two years, one of our original four, the others having been lost through a process of natural attrition (otherwise known as the fox. And the puppy). Since Christmas, when the last two ducks were brutally torn from us, this duck has hung out with the dogs, Teo and Maxim, in a very sweet and strange little threesome. Teo is totally laid back about the situation (possibly he hasn’t even noticed) – the duck follows him everywhere and when he lies down, she does too, and when he goes off to bark at something in the distance, she goes too and stares off intently into the same distance, seemingly on the very point of barking. Maxim is somewhat more bothered, he being the one that killed the first duck and now living in fear of retribution; this duck tries to nick food from his bowl, and you can just see Maxim’s torment as he suppresses his natural canine instinct to rip her throat out and meekly backs away. The upshot of this is that the duck basically seems to think she’s a dog, which is why we’re not sure what her reaction to the ducklings is going to be. Apart from, so far, confusion – “What are these little things? They’re not puppies. Get them away from me.” I wouldn’t like to shut the ducklings in with her in the duckhouse overnight in case we opened the door in the morning to baby-duck carnage.

Later
So: tonight's the big night and we’re putting the ducklings in their tub and leaving it (covered) in the enclosure, with the big duck shut in the attached duckhouse. So the little ducks get a chance to experience night in the big wide world, and the big duck gets used to having them in her territory.

Come the morning, we will know all.