Look! We have baby ducks!
We have these ducks on the land called Muscovey ducks. They are not very beautiful, and they don’t quack.
About a month ago, the three females started laying a lot of eggs and have been brooding for a while now. On the full moon, the first one hatched! Unfortunately, the mom stepped on it and killed it. This happened with four other babies. So yesterday, when five more eggs hatched, we decided to take the babies away from the moms. When they first hatch, the babies are really wet and scraggly-looking. But when their feathers dry, they get very fluffy and cute. And they are already pretty strong by an hour or so after they hatch. So we fed the 5 babies by hand and watched them during the day. We let them have a little swim in a tub of water. Even at one day old they can already swim! At night, we put them in a dry tub with straw and put the tub on a compost pile for warmth and covered it. We were so happy this morning to find that all but one of them were alive this morning! (The one that died was called Sleepy, because it kept nodding off during the day – its mom was squishing it when we took it out of the coop. We weren’t surprised that she didn’t make it through the night). So these ducklings will be raised by hand and put back with their moms when they’re too big to be squished.
