Duck Buddies

Life and death in the Big Brooder House.

Our Indian Runner Duck eggs hatched last week and we had two chicks survive the difficult and traumatic hatching process. Of the other four eggs in the batch, two did not survive hatching and two appeared infertile.  Sadly, after the enormous effort of emerging to a living & breathing world one of the living chicks also passed away after 24 hours so we needed to get a pal for our wee survivor.

Smallholding isn’t all blue skies and fluffy ducklings, it’s an emotional coaster too. Here is the first few days of Sharoo:

So this week, thanks to Google we identified another solo Indian Runner duck of the same age and headed off to glorious Ardersier to bring the buddy back.

The new duck on the block is nicknamed ‘Duckzilla’ as she is a monster compared to Saroo, but they get on amazingly well and are fun to watch racing around their room together.

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We also came home with two slightly older birds – more on them in another post.  I will end with the sad news that a few of our beautiful hens from the last blog were snatched by foxes this week, literally from under our noses outside the study window before being chased away.