Goose Pond, Ducks - Plein Air

© Robin Edmundson, 'Goose Pond, Ducks - plein air', watercolor, 9 x 12 inches. 

At the beginning of the month, I spent another wonderful morning painting the view of the marshes from the visitors center at Goose Pond. Things are starting to rev up for the season. I could hear thousands of cranes, geese and ducks. This is the view toward the north. There was quite a bit more water in the ponds this time and the ducks were taking full advantage. I saw hundreds flying in and around these few ponds.

Duck Therapy

I've told you before about the problem we have with stray dogs out here.  Not long ago, a couple of those strays attacked our flock of ducks.  Luckily I was there when it happened and was able to get the dogs away before they could kill any.   Four of the ducks were gashed and one of those was left with a pretty bad leg. 

K2 took charge with the Blu-Kote and we checked everyone over and sprayed the four hurt ones.   One of the nice things about the blu-kote is that it dyes them purple, so it's easy to see which ones need to be checked on.  

The duck with the gash in her back and a hurt leg is named Honey.  K2, Eric and I checked her over carefully looking for a break in the leg.  We didn't find one.   There was no obvious swelling either.   So, we separated her and a buddy out and have let her rest.  K2 goes out 2 or 3 times a day to check her and do some massage therapy and water therapy.  

The duck loves the water.   Big surprise.  It supports her and allows her to move the bad leg in a better way.

K2 did some research and found that warm water was recommended because it'll help things relax, so she's been using the studio sink for Honey's PT.    It seems to be working.   Slowly, she's moving the leg more and more and we're hopeful that she'll make a complete recovery. 

Poop Quiz!

It's been ages since we've done a poop quiz and I've been looking for just the right poop.  

I found it on my back patio.   Dee-lightful.   I got the pics just before asking the kids to hose off all the brick.    The culprits have been hanging out far too often back there and it was getting....eeww.

I'm sure you understand.

These are not the culprits. 

These butterflies do, however, enjoy partaking of the mineral content of the ... offerings.   [We also see butterflies on carrion, which is disgusting, but there's no accounting for tastes.]   These offerings were somewhat wetter than the above, but left by the same creature.



So, let me know in the comments what is responsible for this poop butterfly buffet.

Love

K2 forms a real bond with each of her babies and can tell them apart from when they're pretty small.   [They all look the same to me - beige]  She knows which ones like the water the most.  Which ones could snuggle all day.  Which ones do not like the water thank you very much.  Which ones whistle and which ones quack the loudest.  They follow her around like puppies.

Here she is in front of a stock tank that she used as a swimming pool for them until they got big enough to go down to the creek.   Each duck got a snuggle as it came out.  She loves them. 

And they love her.










[pics: Lily Jenness]

Ducklings

Our Saxony ducklings are big enough to really enjoy the water. There are 9 of them and they don't like to be separated, so K2 commandeered the wheelbarrow for a pool.

Worked like a charm.   The ducklings adore it.  

It only takes a couple of minutes before they are soaking.  You can see the water really moving in this last pic. 

After bath time, they spend a while preening and when they're all dry again, they're soft and fluffy.

Adorable.

Ducklings

Ducklings are just plain cute.   We adore them.  

K2 lives for her ducklings.  They are her babies and she is completely in charge of them. This year she is raising Saxonies.  They are a rare breed, large, buff, gray and white markings.    The ducklings are pricey and we need every one to thrive.

This is their outdoor enclosure.   We let them play outside on hot days.  They love it.

Ducks put meat on fast - much faster than chicks do.  Chicks put all their energy into feathers, while ducklings put all their energy into size.  

This was their first day of being allowed to play/swim in the water.   Most of them weren't interested. 

This one loved the water and once s/he discovered it, s/he didn't want to get out.

Kind of like K2, who feels the same way about water.  

It might be another week or so before the babies really learn to swim.

Shy Ducks Update

We drove by the beaver pond and K2 snapped this quick pic. [Sorry it's not a better pic]  Blow it up and count the ducks!   We also saw a female with a trail of at least 6 ducklings.   Awesome!

Very Shy Ducks

Down the way from us is a beaver pond.   With beavers and everything.  And a ginormous swamp rose that's maybe 1/2 acre all by itself. 

It's totally totally cool.Totally.

We noticed that this year there are at least two pairs of ducks there - a pair of wood ducks and a pair of mallards.   Both are pretty nice looking ducks.

The wood ducks like to nest in trees and I'm betting that this tree is where they're nesting. Click the pic to biggify it.  I see two holes, so maybe there's another pair?

Whenever we get remotely within sight, they take off to the back area of the wetland. I'm hoping that I'll eventually get a pic of one.   I'd be over the moon if I could catch a pic of the ducklings.

True Love

Edward and duck have been hanging around together a lot this year.    Every morning they do the head bobbing conversation thing.  

It makes me dizzy.

Seriously, have you ever seen ducks do that?  One bobs its head down then up, then another will.   They 'talk' back and forth, silently.  Up and down, up and down, up and down.  Bobbing, bobbing, bobbing.  

Then they follow each other all over the yard for the rest of the day. 

It must be love.

Missy Duck

Missy Duck and her cohort came to us many years ago from our friend, Faith.   There were five female rouens in the batch and they were thrilled to come live here since we have a creek very close to the coop.  Duck heaven.

Over the years, we lost two of those rouens.   And we bought a few other ducks.   

The pekins didn't last long because the foxes targeted their bright white hides faster than you can say duck a l'orange.  K2 was heartbroken.  Since then we've made sure to get ducks that can camouflage. 

Once the last batch of ducklings got big enough to identify, we discovered we had three new males and three new females.  

By then there were three ducks left in Missy Duck's original cohort.   They spent the day studiously avoiding the babies. 

Missy Ducks was not thrilled with the new males. 

At.  All.

The second year, when the new males were full grown and had figured out what to do with the females, we noticed that Missy Duck would chase them away from her cohort.  Again and again and again.  She was fearless.   It was pretty funny to watch, actually.

Then we noticed she did this:

Notice the curly male tail feather, the neck ring, the green head.  

We have a cross-dressing duck.    She's especially resplendent in the spring, during breeding season.  In the fall, she goes back to her old self.  

More ducks

The ducks don't get a lot of attention on the blog - not because I don't love them, but because they love K2 a lot more than they love me.   When I get close, they take off the other direction.    It makes for difficult photo shooting.   

The other evening after we were done putting in the new strawberry beds, the girls spent some time rounding up the ducks for the night and doing a good physical check of them all.   This means each duck had be caught and snuggled a bit and checked over.   It keeps the ducks a bit tame and lets us get a good look at them periodically.   It isn't a big issue in the winter, but in the summer, when it's easy for them to get fly strike, it's imperative that we are able to catch them, hold them, hose them off and spray the meds on.   Remember when we did that with Trixie last year?

Trixie is fine now. 

See?  Here she is with K2.

No lasting damage at all.   And she loves K2 even more now.

[K2 is wearing work clothes.  She just spent the afternoon hauling gravel and sand, and burning the cardboard pile.  Notice the TARDIS blue fingernails.]

This is Jim.   He's Trixie's boyfriend.   [Yes, it's from the books.]   He's a big feisty drake and protested being held.  The good news was that he flapped around so much it was easy to check under his wings.    He does a great job protecting his ladies. 

This beautiful duck [the same one at the top of the post] is Prince Edward.  His poof is gorgeous even though it's usually falling off to one side. 
 

 We have 5 other ducks, including a hermaphroditic one.   I"ll try to get pics of her soon.

Our Ducks

Our ducks love the winter just as much as they love the rest of the year.   They have a creek close by and although it already had a couple of quiet little enclosures in it, they've taken them and by sheer force of will, carved them out a little wider and a little deeper so they've got room enough to paddle around all the time. 

They are a mixed batch.   You can see Prince Edward with the fluffy tophat.  He's very elegant.  The ones that look like mallards are rouens.   We have a sex changing duck - or perhaps cross-dressing is a better term.   She's female, then during breeding time her feathers go male and she protects her little cohort, then in the fall she's back to female.   It's a little weird. 

Trixie has the Blues

K2 loves her ducks.  A lot.

So it was very upsetting to discover that Trixie had suffered a fly strike.    We think it was a combination of grooming herself for her nest and being a drake magnet.   The boys won't leave her alone.   And it's been damp.   And she's been setting.   And she hid her nest under a daylily, next to some siberian iris in the lower flower terrace.   It's cozy there, but not much air circulation.   The flies found her. 

I won't describe what K2 found.    Eew.   It took an extremely strong stomach and a lot of courage for a 12 year old to gather Trixie up and bring her to me.

Trixie had a large active area on her lower back and a smaller area under one wing.  We washed her and washed her and washed her.   Then K2 did some internet research.

Can I just say right here that I heart the internet?  

I heart the internet.    Seriously.

K2 did the preliminary investigation and then I followed up with the technical stuff.  There are wonderful posts out there about these kinds of problems.   Backyard Chickens forum is a fount of excellent information.  

After some reading, we decided to spray her with ProZap to kill the rest of the flies.  We did that for a couple of days, then we sprayed her down with Blu-Kote as an added antiseptic to help her heal.   We've kept her penned up, away from the others and out of the water so that she'll stay dry and so the boys won't bother her.    [They've been hanging out right next to her pen.]

I find it professionally ironic that both of these medications dyed her blue.   She's gorgeous!   The light blue is the ProZap, the darker is the Blu-Kote.   Yes, her beak is blue.  Both medications are safe. 

I almost wish we could keep her this color.

Seriously.

Duck in a Bucket

This is Edwina, but for some reason K2 calls her Emeralda.   We found her in the feed bucket when we opened the coop this morning.   She was not happy.

Any guesses on how she got in there?  

Experiments with Ducks and Chickens

Our current ducks

Our second spring here, we decided to raise more domesticated livestock:  sheep, chickens and ducks.  We got the ducks because our neighbor has a pond and wanted some.  We got the sheep because I am a spinner and wanted to raise my own fleeces and because it is very difficult to raise anything this part of Indiana except cows, corn, soybeans and tobacco and the state is trying to expand into other crops, like sheep.  We got the chickens because, well, this is a farm.  

We got the chickens and ducks first.  We had driven all the way up to Indianapolis to a place that advertised itself as a hatchery only to find that it was a glorified pet store that did none of the hatching, but got weekly, Monday, shipments of chicks from a real hatchery.  They still had a very small selection of breeds by the time we got there on Saturday and we were able to get eleven chickens of various types and five Khaki Campbell ducks.  We got our first lesson in fowl production on our way home.   Those cute little fuzzy balls stink.