The ducks played a little duck joke

The ducks played a little duck joke on us last night. We couldn’t find them at dusk to put them away: they’d just disappeared into thin air. For a fox to have come and taken both of them in broad daylight without leaving any trace seemed almost impossible, especially as both the dogs were around and would surely have barked. We looked all round the garden and in the woods, in the barns and outhouses and all sorts of nooks and crannies but no sign of them.

This morning I looked out of the window hopefully, in case they’d arrived back during the night and were pecking away in their run, but no. Thinking sadly how much we really are the kiss of death for ducks, I went out to feed the rest of the animals. When I was getting Cassie’s hay from the barn I heard a little quacky noise, and then the male duck popped up chirpily from behind a bale of hay. He looked at me with a kind of “Yeah? So what?” look. He and the girl duck must have spent the night in a cosy corridor squeezed between the bales and the wall of the barn.

Very funny, ducks.

In reality, they were being very clever: right at the back of where they’d slept, I found an egg. Her first egg since they stopped laying in December, and proof that she has recovered from her recent near-death experience with the fox.