This morning when I went up to feed the ducks I was concerned when I couldn’t hear them cheeping through the outside door. They were still fairly quiet even after I got into the work room next to the room they stay in…and considering the door connecting the two was open, I got a bit worried by the relative silence. Usually the girls are cheeping and peeping and honking and doing little tap dances when I visit them in the morning. What was wrong?

I walked into the duck room…and five little ducklings swarmed around my feet. Escapees! After the initial surprise wore off, I began to wonder where the other two girls were. I quickly found one still in the brooder, but the seventh was nowhere to be seen. Did she get outside somehow where she was eaten by a hungry raccoon? Was she stuck in the table saw? Arg!

I decided to take the girls down to their pen/tractor in the hopes that this would draw out the last duckling. When I pulled back the cardboard barrier around the brooder to let the sixth duckling out, number seven peeked out from where she was hiding (stuck?) behind the cardboard and under the edge of the brooder/pool. Phew.

Feeling like a parent on a school field trip making sure no kids were left behind in the reptile house, I counted and recounted feathery heads to make sure everyone was present as we tumbled down the hill to the duck tractor. I think we need to get the duck house secured and ready to inhabit ASAP because the ducklings can no longer be contained by cardboard and a baby pool.

When I went back into the house to tell Andy what had happened, I was giggly because escaped ducklings is rather cute. Andy was less than amused, however, and said, “Yeah, you think it’s funny, but you aren’t the one who has to go clean up duck poop all over the workshop floors!” HAHAHAHAHAAH!

Speaking of cute critters, here’s a photo of Sana sprawled in the sun.

My brother drew a design for our duck house that we, alas, had to reject. We couldn’t get the city to approve the wifi tower, and PETA was unhappy with the spiral staircase. They said it would cause too much stress to the ducks. How else, I ask, were the ducks supposed to get to / from the landing pad?

The work on our duck house continues. The boys got the walls framed and are finishing up the walls. Mom and I did some priming, but we couldn’t keep up with the boys’ progress. Plus we were running low on primer. Here’s some photos of the progress. Eventually the whole thing will be painted brickish red. We got two cans of really pricey paint for $2 each (normally over $30 each), so who cares about the color. Maybe I’ll put a mosiac on the side or something fun later.

It’s back to work tomorrow for me. Andy will probably collapse all day and rest. Or maybe paint. Hee.

Dad, Andy, and Craig worked on building the duck house all day today. They got the base finished, and I started priming it while they worked on framing the walls.

I ran out of primer, and they ran out of 2x4s. Dad and Andy went off to the store, and Mom and I decided to whip up some jam. Too bad the propane ran out right before the fruit began to boil. Bummer. We weren’t able to get the tanks off, so we had to put things on hold and wait for the guys to get back and use their muscles of steel to unhook the tanks. They ran down to J&Js for a fill up, and we finally got to make jam. It’s YUMMY. Would be better without the seeds, but still yummy.

We made 8 pints of jam, and used up most of the berries we picked on Saturday. Time to pick more! I’d like to try and make a pie tomorrow, so not only will I need more berries but ‘ll also need to figure out how to strain most of the seeds out. It’s all a learning experience.

A couple of days ago, we started herding the ducks back and forth between their daytime pen and their brooder (which is getting very small for them!). It took two people to keep the ducks moving in the correct direction because they are easily distracted by things like bugs, grass, puffs of wind. Here’s a picture of me trying to coax the ducks up the hill by wiggle their food bowl at them.

Tonight, for the first time, we opened the door, I wiggled the food and called to the ducks, and they came running. They followed me all the way up the hill with no detours! One got a bit lost and wouldn’t head up the ramp back into their bed. She was so confused and sad, but finally I got hold of her and put her with sisters.

My parents and brother are here for the long weekend, and we thought we’d teach them a few of the ways of the Loafkeepers. My dad decided he wanted to learn to mow, so Andy took him down to the flat part of the lawn and gave him a few quick lessons. Dad said he’d stick with a lawnmower and weedeater.

While Dad and Andy were mowing, Mom and I wandered around and looked at plants. Raspberry plants. Dad passed the scythe over to Andy, and the next thing you know we had filled up Mom’s hands with berries. We send Dad up to the house for a container, and after a while we wandered down the road to a bigger patch of berries. The only problem…the patch was behind a lot of rather tall grass and weeds. I twisted Andy’s arm, and he mowed a path around the berry patch. But he couldn’t stop there and hacked away to make paths for us to get to more berries.

We picked and picked, and I went back up to the house for another container. Dad and I finished off the patch, and Andy went searching for more patches. He came back over to where Dad and I were. I asked him if he found any berries.

He said, “You know the taco bell dog?”

“Yeah.”

“What is he always saying?”

“Umm…yo quero taco bell?”

“I think I need a bigger box.”

Andy found a ton more berries, and we quickly filled up the second container.

The bushes are all loaded with unripe berries. We could probably pick a couple of buckets every day for a long time. What will we do with all these berries? Perhaps we need a freezer.

This afternoon I was sitting on the porch watching sheets of rain come down (while at the same time incredibly sunny), and I glanced over at the duck tractor. Today it seems the ducks have learned that they can get out of the rain if they sit under the little roof I put up for them. But then one duck would run out into the rain, and alllll the other ducks would follow, they’d make a big circle and realize they are getting wet, so they would runnnnnnnn back under the shelter. After waiting 30 seconds, this would repeat. Again, and again, and again…

At least one of our ducklings has started to quack! It’s not a well-defined quack…more like a baby-talk quack…but it was quacking nonetheless!

Our little quackers are now two weeks old, so we took them outside to play in the almost-finished (darn rain) tractor recently. Look how big they are getting!

Ducks

We also filled up their pool with water so they could swim around. Only two could seem to figure it out, however.

Ducks in pool

Look, she’s duck shaped now instead of baby shaped!

Tall duck

The ducks are now nine days old. In celebration of this occasion, they got to go outside and play. They have outgrown their mailing box, but luckily we still have moving boxes. Not only are the ducks bigger, but they are smarter and faster and more difficult to catch to put in the box to take outside. The first duckling in the box and the last one left outside the box both peep extremely sadly…confused and frightened at suddenly being all alone. Once they are reunited with their sisters, they stop the sad peeping instantly. Andy decided to start picking up the ducks more often to try and get them more used to being handled.

Since ducks don’t eat birthday cake, I decided to give them just a cake pan.

Yes..that is a cake pan we regularly use. If you visit us and have cake or brownies, you may very well be eating something cooked in a pan that ducklings played in. At one point, two of the girls were practicing their Olympic synchronized swimming routine.

When the ducklings were done with their birthday swim, they hopped out of the pan and wiggled and shook like dogs to get some of the water off. They wiggled their little tails and flapped their little wings and shimmied and jigged. Then back into their brooder for a nap.

We were out all morning/afternoon running our weekly errands and buying a tire. (Thanks L. & D. for the anniversary money! It’s quite a nice tire.) When we got home, I dashed up the hill to check on the Crumbs while Andy put away groceries. It was over 95F! Aie! The ducks didn’t seem to care, truly, but with the heat and the smell (ducks poop, you know) I thought it was an appropriate time to air out the garage, clean the brooder, and let the girls have some time in the yard.

We loaded the ducklings back into the box they arrived in for the journey down the hill to the duck tractor. Look at how they’ve grown in just a few days!

Andy guarded them from hawks, vultures, owls, and rabid frogs while I cleaned out the brooder. PHhhhHhhHewie! The lawn hay sure does work well because I had no idea there was a lake of brown liquid at the bottom, and the ducklings probably didn’t either. Here’s a photo of Andy keeping guard.

We bought some grit today, too, and put it out for the girls to chomp. From what I’ve read, if ducks are eating commercial food they don’t really need grit (I guess it’s squishy?), but it’s good for them to have it.

While we were out today, we also stopped in at the Radford Farmer’s Market, which is nice but puny. We also visited the only yarn store I’ve found in the area. It’s not really a store; it’s a corner of the basement level of a store. What they have is nice, but they don’t have a lot, and unless I missed something, they don’t have many books. I guess yarn/knitting isn’t as big around here as back in AA.