What We’ll Do for a Duck…

As you may or may not know… I have pet ducks.

I say PET ducks, because no way and no-how are we going to eat them.

(Except for in case of the Apocalypse and/or the Zombie Apocalypse. But even then, we’d likely hatch some new ducklings for the express purpose of eating, and raise them with the intent of eating, and not, you know, name them and stuff, so that the guilt of eating them is somewhat lessened. The main point being… we’re NOT going to eat our adorable ducks unless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.)

We absolutely will, however, eat their eggs. But I digress….

We’ve had our pet ducks for a little over two years now. It’s been a fun and interesting and challenging, but overall very rewarding, experience so far.

The saddest thing about having pet ducks is that everything wants to eat them. Literally. Everything.

Even some of your friends come over and joke about eating them. (Not cool, btw, if you happen to be one of those friends who might consider saying something like that. You probably wouldn’t like it if I came over and joked about eating your dog or cat, would you? Didn’t think so. It’s like that. Especially after all the effort it takes to raise freakin’ ducklings!)

But I digress again…

The original two ducks I brought home as cute little fluffy yellow ducklings are no longer with us. 🙁 One was eaten by something when he was one year old, and our female, Sherlock (the male was Watson), sadly died of a respiratory infection despite our efforts to nurse her back to health.

The male we bought full-grown to keep Sherlock company after Watson’s death, however, is still alive and well and pretty much a jerk-face. His ego is far too large for such a little duck.

Well, after Sherlock’s passing, we got two new baby females and hand-raised them, and eventually we had a happy flock of three.

And then, about two weeks ago now, we adopted another full-grown female because the rest of her flock had been eaten and our friends couldn’t handle anymore duck-deaths, poor things. So we took her in.

Now, we have a happy flock of four.

We also have two ponds on the property. We thought the other day it would be nice to let them all out of our fenced backyard to swim on the pond, because that’s what ducks do, right?

We’d let Sherlock and Watson and Sherlock and Owen (the new male – my son named him) out on the pond often, and they were quite self-sufficient. When they were done swimming, they’d come back to the yard. No big deal.

I wasn’t entirely sure our new flock would do this, since they were all still quite young. (All the females are only four months old.) We had faith in Owen, however. He knew the drill. Surely he’d lead them back at dusk, at the very least.

So we shepherded them all out to the pond. They jumped in. They swam. They dove. They ate plantstuff and generally had a blast. They LOVED it.

We left the backyard gate open so they could put themselves up when they were done, and checked on them every now and then.

Well. THEY DID NOT COME IN.

The feathered punks were still out on the pond after dark! Which is NOT what ducks do, and which is not a good idea! (See the aforementioned point that literally everything wants to eat ducks.)

The hubby considered just letting nature take its course.

I was less inclined to allow this, since it would most surely mean at least three dead ducks (the girls are too heavy to fly – Owen is a decent flyer). And as I also said above… raising ducklings is hard freakin’ work! If anything, I didn’t want to have to do that AGAIN. Plus, I’d just gotten attached to these girls!

So. I put on my muck boots. And I went down into the pond.

In the dark. With a flashlight. To get the damn ducks back inside. Trying not to think about how creepy the pond looked at night, with the murky water revealed in only a small circle of light in front of me, trying not to let my author-brain invent stories about what I had just stumbled over under the water, or about what was tugging on my pants as I waded onward….

Yes, that is how much I care about our pet ducks. -_-

But you should be happy to know, this story has a happy ending. After about twenty minutes of slogging through pond muck, three of the ducks were safely inside where nothing could eat them.

But wait… didn’t I just say we had FOUR ducks?

Yes, yes I did. You see, the fourth duck, Beru, is a White-Crested Duck. We didn’t know it when we got her, but it seems that breed can sometimes have neurological issues (because, terrifyingly, the crest is a result of a deformed skull – and if I would have known this before, I wouldn’t have gotten one! It pays to do your research, folks. Sigh). Beru doesn’t have any physical problems, but she does have some, uh, intelligence problems.

Three ducks went one way, she went the opposite way. Who does that!?!? I had to bring the hubby out to help direct her in the right direction, and in the end she just hunkered down under a thicket of grass and sticks and tried to hide from us. Luckily, the giant poof of feathers on her head gives her no peripheral vision.

I slowly walked up to her, wet and splattered with pond mud by that point, then reached down real quick and nabbed her. And carried her back to the house.

SIGH. SERIOUSLY, DUCKS.

Needless to say, their pond visiting privileges have been revoked until further notice….

What kind of fun things have you done for your animals? Surely I can’t be the only crazy one….