Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Baby Wood Ducks

I'm re-posting this from last Wednesday since Blogger can't seem to restore it. The draft that was saved had about half of what I had written, I had added a few more things and now they are gone and I guess will not be restored. It's not exactly the same since I can't remember everything I wrote, but here's most of it....

WOW! It has been a crazy 24-48 hours around our house! In my previous post , I shared the girls swimming in the pool for the first time. Then the same night, Sunday night, we went next door with our neighbors to look at the baby geese that had hatched a few days ago.  I couldn't believe how big they were already! They were swimming and following the momma goose like they were already weeks old.  Then we went to check the wood duck houses we have around our place to see if any eggs were inside.  When we opened the door, the momma duck flew away and we found that there were eggs inside.  We decided to leave them and come back the next day, Monday, to get the eggs and put them in an incubator.  Tuesday afternoon, my neighbor and I went to  check the same duck house to gather the eggs.  We opened the door to the house and a baby duck literally jumps out at us! We couldn't believe it! We had just checked the night before and the house was full of eggs and now there are baby ducks everywhere! 
 I really wish we had a video of our reaction! You have to picture us, one on a ladder and the other holding the bucket that we have to place the eggs in. Then scrambling trying to get the door shut so the others do not fall out while trying to get the other one that had fallen out back in the house. You can imagine how surprised we were when the night before we had eggs and then not even 20 hours later we had 17 baby ducks jumping around! One of the baby ducks was not even an hour old, still wet and having difficulty moving around. Since neither one of us was prepared for the ducklings, we frantically called our husbands for support. I can not emphasize enough how unprepared we were for the eggs to have already hatched!


We finally got the cage put together with the bedding, food, water and the baby ducks inside. They didn't settle down for quite a while, chirping and climbing the walls like crazy . We decided to introduce the dogs individually so they could to get used to them being inside. As you would expect, Polar Bear was scared while Hershey and Sissy were the most curious, trying to figure what all the commotion was about.

 
Polar Bear's first time to see the ducks.
Sissy's first time to see the ducks.

Hershey's first time to see the ducks.

 

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