If it quacks like a duck...

As some of you might know, a few weeks ago one of our chicky girls, Kiwi, was attacked by one of the neighborhood dogs. She has made a full recovery, but since she was out and away from the other girls for so long they are being kinda rough on her and she is getting bumped down on the pecking order. So, the other day I grabbed her out of the chicken coop and took her over to the duck pen just so she could get outside and away from the rest of the girls for a bit.  Well, that created a monster. Every morning now when I let the girls out, Kiwi is the last one out and promptly jumps the fence, follows me back over toward the house, and hops into the duck pen. Kiwi now thinks she is one of the ducks, but Nibs is not so sure about that.

Duck is standing on the edge of the pool, Houdini and Victoria are to the left,
Kiwi's bum on the right, and Nibs is in the doorway of the little house.

Nibs (Nibble Duck for those of you who did not know her name) has been laying eggs in their little house since the spring. We have been collecting them off and on for a while but since last week I have let them just kinda sit there in the house not thinking much of it since Nibs has never really sat on them for more than an afternoon.  When Kiwi more or less moved in and laid a couple of her eggs in with Nibs's eggs, someone started getting upset. Then, yesterday when Kiwi tried to go into the duck house, Nibs was having none of it. It turns out, she has resolutely been sitting on her eggs for 2-5 days now with good consistency. So, just about every time that we came to the ducks' yard she was in the little house sitting on her eggs with Duck (yes his name is Duck Duck, I know real creative) sitting just outside on guard duty.

At bedtime, we decided to check the eggs out and see what was going on. Nibs has 12 eggs in a little nest right by the door to the duck house. All the hay that was in the house has been pushed and bunched up to create the little nest and sure enough all the eggs were all nice and warm, except for the one that had rolled out onto the ground in front of the duck house. Earlier in the day, we had found an egg outside the house, so we put it back in the nest, but at the end of the day it was out again, and this time we noticed that it was cracked. We kept that one and grabbed our flashlight and started checking the eggs that were still in the nest. The flashlight was somewhat dim, but we were able to candle the eggs and sure enough it looks like she has the eggs somewhere around 3-5 days into development. We brought the cracked egg inside and broke it open into a bowl to check it out and there is a definite development spot that matches up to about the 1 or 2 day developmental stage for a fertile egg.

Candled egg from the nest.

Candled egg that was pushed out of the nest.
Not much to see.

The egg that was out of the nest - the whitish circle is what would have become a duckling.

So, the exciting news for The Dusty Rose Micro-Farm is that we are on track for our two awesome (and sometimes bad ass) pekin ducks to be hatching out some ducklings in about 20-23 days.  We will keep you all posted along the way and try to get some development pictures and video if we can. Now, who wants some ducklings?

Nate "Grand-duck" Rumbaugh

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
-Douglas Adams