Muscovey ducklings – so pretty!
Patti & Eric kindly gifted us with 14 partly-grown Moscovey ducklings and 3 adults (a male and 2 females) on Saturday. I shut the adults in our portable broiler chicken shed, so they wouldn’t try and fly home right away. I put the babies in the chicken coop. The portable shed will be needed in a couple of months for Madeline’s 4-H feeder pig project, and I didn’t want to have to retrain the baby ducks on where to roost at night.
This is seriously inconveniencing the chickens, having the coop shut up 24/7 for a few days, and they’re sure to let me know about it every chance they get.
Yesterday afternoon when I went out to check on the ducks, I opened the door to the shed holding the adult ducks and counted one…two… … … where is the third duck? How does a duck escape a locked building? I crawled around inside the shed, accusing the 2 ducks remaining of playing a trick on me. But there was no third duck hiding in the straw, ready to jump out and yell, Boo! Or, Hiss! (Muscovies hiss rather than quack.)
There are small vent holes at the top of each end of the shed, and I can only figure that she managed to fly up there and squeeze through. I went looking for her, and she was hanging out at the creek with our original 2 ducks. Acts like she’s been here forever.
I’m finding out that ducks are much messier than chickens. I can’t wait until their confinement is up and I can let the coop dry out – they’ve made such a mess with the water! But they’re so beautiful, and quiet, and the way they “wag” their tail feathers is just way cute. They’re easily forgiven for being messy.
OK, so, question for you. Does anyone ever own just one chicken? Make it two: do you have any problems with predators getting after your birds?
PatL – yes, I think someone could own just one chicken. I don’t think they’re quite as herd-like, whereas calves can literally die of lonlieness if they’re the only one. Still, 2 or 3 would be better.As long as the chickens stay around the barnyard we don’t have much predator problem. Only if they get broody and try to set a nest in the machine shed do we lose one, probably to a stray tomcat or a fox. Our broiler chickens are raised further out on pasture, and the main predator problem we have there is owls. We lost several ducks this year, and we aren’t sure where they were taken or if it was fox or what.