Life in the duck lane

Quite unexpectedly, the ducks have become everyone's favourite farm animal.
Everything they do is comical - the way they move, the noises they make, the way they behave.

They waddle around the vegetable garden in line, like a runaway train, this way, that way and back this way again. The drake's reassuring quacks give away their presence. Otherwise, they just get on with life, coming and going, going and coming, ever dabbing their beaks into the ground after juicy morsels.

They demand very little. A toddlers paddling pool for the occasional dip, the odd handful of food and a house for the night.

The ducks struggled to get in and out of their water,
so I made a ramp for them out of turves.

As well as the three lovely duck eggs they leave in their house most mornings, the ducks have fulfilled their primary function, as there are now very few slugs to be found in the veg plot. In fact, they have learned to follow the rotavator, snapping up the worms and such like. When Don is working his land, they stand by the fence watching.

They did once though unearth all my onion sets just minutes after I had planted them! Had they unearthed the lot, I could have just replanted them. However, they just scattered a few randomly over the soil, leaving me with no clue where the gaps were. The result is that I now have some very gappy rows of onions.

I have learned to give it half an hour or so between rotavating a veg bed and planting anything into it.



The ducks have learned to go in after the rotavator.

But the ducks are naughty!

Leave the gate open for a few seconds and they're out, without fail, exploring and wandering.

And so to my party trick. For all I have to do is shout "DUCKS" in my firmest teacher voice and up pop their heads in unison before they waddle off at speed back towards the veg plot.

The good news is that the ducks cannot fly. Otherwise I've a sneaky feeling they'd be off into the sky with the wild mallards which wheel around and fly low over every now and then.

So that's it. Life in the duck lane.

...and I never even stooped to a "quackers" pun.

Cayugas and Cream Legbars

Sunday 12th August 2012
No mist or fog. Signals a change in the weather.

New arrivals

About a week ago I decided to give ducks a go, chiefly to become a major part of my anti-slug campaign. A bit of research revealed that what I needed were Cayugas - a glossy black duck which is quieter than others, docile and does not wander too far.

As luck would have it, I found a possible source fairly nearby, up at Frampton Fen.

Cream Legbars

Then a double dose of luck, for the same place also had two Cream Legbar chicks, both females.

Cream Legbar chicks are
autosexing. This means you can
tell males from females...
if you know what you're looking for.



I'd been struggling to find a local source for these and did not want to resort to eggs through the post again. After two goes at hatching these beautiful blue eggs, we produced a grand total of two cockerels (not entirely our fault as the second dozen eggs were infertile - I'm still waiting for them to be replaced). So the hope is that by next spring we will have  a breeding trio of Cream Legbars to give us blue eggs and our own source of Legbar chicks.

They weren't going cheap (sorry!) but hatching from eggs has in this case proved to be a false economy. Besides, blue eggs and legbar chicks in the future will soon repay the investment. To buy a trio (a cockerel and two hens) would cost in the region of £40 so we'll still save money, even after all our frustrations. And when we do eventually get those other replacement eggs we will have birds from three different sources which will ensure a better genetic mix.

The Cayugas

The ducks are more difficult to sex than the Legbars, but the experienced ear can tell the difference in their call once they reach a couple of months old. Andrew, the owner of the farm, caught four young birds for us and reckons we should have a drake and three ducks. And here they are, settling into their new home.

They took to their new surroundings like ducks to water!

They quickly muddied the water.
Ducks need access to water but, like the geese, there needs to be a very large pond which can sustain the mess they make or a small water container so that the water can be easily changed.

Females get some white in the plumage when they get older.
The white in these ducks' plumage probably displays some impurity.
However, I'm really not bothered by show standards,
as long as they eat slugs and quack contentedly.

Once they've settled in we'll move the Cayugas around the veg patches. Hopefully they will keep down the pests without causing too much destruction of their own. For now we'll leave them be to get used to their new home.