Posts in category: Welsh Harlequin

The duck house & small temporary yard are working out nicely.  The ducks have been fine outside, and know they can go back in the house when they want to, so we’ve decided to leave them outside pretty much all day now, as long as we are home.  I am in the garden much of the time keeping an eye on them.  We’ve also taken the barrier off the pool, and allow them to go in when they want.  They usually go in after eating, to drink and bathe.  We also put up a chunk of plywood on blocks that they can sit under for shade, and they do seem to like it.

At first, only one or two would go in the pool.  They look so much alike it’s hard to tell if it’s the same one or two, of if they’re all taking turns, but I never see Whitey go in.  He does look much better now (see previous post), but he still seems less active than the others.

The ducklings are so cute in the pool.  They float, they dip their heads down and sometimes dive and swim under water, even though the pool is barely deep enough for them to do it.  They can actually stand on the bottom, or lift their legs and float.  They look so natural when they’re in the water—it’s quite evident that their bodies were made for it.  We have a step inside for them to use to get out more easily, but often they don’t bother with the step, they just jump out somehow and do a belly flop on the ground.  Often when they get out of the water, they stand up tall and flap their little wings.  Very cute.

The video is a little out of focus when zoomed in, but you’ll get the idea.

The ducklings are three weeks old now.  They’re getting so big!  We’re so glad we didn’t get them until June.  I cannot imagine having ten ducklings this size in our basement.  We had planned to get a larger box of some kind, or build something to keep them in down there, but with the smell and poop and trying to keep the thing clean it would have been quite difficult.

The ducklings’ down is beginning to change to small feathers, and most of them are getting darker on their backs.  (Whitey is getting lighter and creamier in color.)  Their tails are more pronounced, and the oil duct at the back of the tail is evident.  They rub their faces on it, then rub different parts of their body to groom and add the oil water-repellency to their feathers.  We wonder which are the drakes or ducks, and are hoping to have at least three ducks to lay eggs.  Their voices haven’t changed yet, they still peep and squeak.  

We get such a kick out of watching the ducks.  We keep a couple of chairs out there and sometimes just sit and watch.  We’ve doubled the size of their outside pen, to include the whole tree.  This way they can get shade under the tree at all times of the day, and they have more space to run around.  It is so funny to watch them waddle when they run!  Sometimes they run over each other or tumble.  One of them did a forward summersault when he got tripped by another!   One time as they were being herded in for the night, Whitey got pushed over by another duck and laid there on his back, feet waving in the air, peeping like crazy until he managed to roll over.  It was pretty comical.

Whitey is doing much better, and I’m not so concerned.  He/she is about as active as the others, gets in the pool and enjoys it, and seems just fine.  His/her color is getting lighter, more of a creamy yellow.  I kind of hope Whitey turns out to be a female, so we can keep her for laying.  If not, we’ll have a nice, plump roast duck to compare with the others for eating. 

The little ones are enjoying their new routine, coming out in the morning to meet the day.  Here’s a video of them coming out of their house.

I’m a little concerned about Whitey, the White Appleyard.  He (she?) seems a little more lethargic than the others, and sits a lot, even while eating and drinking.  He’s got an odd reddish spot alongside his neck that particularly shows up when he’s wet, he just seems a bit odd. 

I wonder if he’s growing too fast, and if we’ve given the ducks too much protein.  According to the book, we should be dropping the protein content about now anyway, so I’ll mix some lower protein ingredients into their food to drop down the protein percentage.  We got some organic “hen scratch” at 8% protein, so hopefully that will help, along with a little more oatmeal.  I’ve also been adding some water or whey to their food, as suggested, with my kitchen pastry blender.  It makes a nice, moist, crumbly consistency, and I’ve noticed they don’t run to their waterer quite as quickly or frequently now while eating.  I should have done this from the start—that food seemed awfully dry!

The ducks moved out to their own house today, at two weeks old!  This morning one of them managed to escape the brooder box in the basement, so we decided to hurry up and get their own house completed enough for them to move in.  Tim took a break from work, and I helped, too.  Tim made another frame with hardware cloth on it, so added to the first frame (which was in the brooder) we’ve more than doubled their living space inside.  It’ll be a lot cuter when it’s done and painted, but for now it’s functional–it’s even insulated!  We put the heat lamps out there, since it’s still pretty cool at night.  We got this nifty door at a recycle place: it has interchangeable glass panes or screen door, so we can close ’em up and night or when it’s cold, and let them have more ventilation during the day.

In addition to finishing the inside of the duck house, we put up some temporary fencing to make a pen for them outside the house.  It is so warm now in the daytime, we feel they can spend a fair amount of time outside.  The pool is there, but blocked off so that they can only enter when we are present.  It’s been much cooler since that first day we put them into the pool, so they haven’t been in it since.  When it warms up, we’ll let them go in again, with supervision.

Here’s a video showing them outside by their house.

We’re building “Duck Inn”, the duck house.  The plan is detailed here in Tim’s videos: