I had to get up early this morning to get the ducks taken care of before school. I mean, 5:30 early, which is a whole huge lot earlier than I usually get up. When I checked on the chicks, I noticed that the hospital I had built for the injured, small chick was empty, and when I counted the chicks in the bin, there were indeed 16. Apparently, she felt well enough to rejoin the flock, so I figured, who am I to try to isolate her? She's still smaller than the other chicks, but none of the others are acting like she is, and all of the others are starting to get their wing and tail feathers while she is not. Well, she has a few, but she is quite delayed.
I've heard that there is often a cannibal in the group, and that they will peck a weak one to death as soon as they sense weakness. She did seem to have some missing down on her back, and she didn't like when I tried to touch that area, so maybe she has been pecked. I hope not, but only time will tell.
I took the ducks swimming again today in the plastic wrapping paper bin. It is clear that they are too big to do that again. The first time I put them in, they were very, very tentative about the process. When they finally decided to move into the deep end, they were only paddling their feet, and one decided to push off the side and dive under his/her siblings. But by and large, it was baby ducks, floating cutely, looking pretty much like fuzzy rubber duckies. This time was different. They were all diving and pushing off of the sides, and they were kicking so much and so hard that I was practically soaked for babysitting them. I set the timer this time for 7:00 minutes, since they still seemed interested at the 5 minute mark last time they swam. Despite his/her awkwardness on land, Lefty is a decent swimmer. Not as decent as its siblings, but s/he can get around OK. I hope it continues to be able to do ducky-things, despite its deformity.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Day #4: May 16, 2011
Today, Monday, was the first day I had to go back to work since taking on the responsibility of the chicks and ducklings. As you can probably see from the title of the blog, the chicks and ducks are fun, sure, but they are also part of a larger experiment to see if I can actually be successful as a homesteader, and maybe eventually full-time farmer. I learned a few things about tending to chicks and ducks today: most importantly, that it takes a lot of time to clean up after the messy, messy, smelly, ducks, and I appreciate having someone to help out.
Cleaning out the chicks' bin is a snap. The hardest part is moving all 16 chickens from the brooder into a cardboard box so that I can clean out the brooder. It's getting harder too, since they're getting bigger and quicker. Occasionally they turn around and peck at my hands, so I've been trying to take the time to hold each one long enough until it settles down in my hands before placing it in the cardboard box. I'm hoping that they will eventually learn that I am not going to harm them, and will stop freaking out when I take the lid off the brooder and try to pick them up. If I am going to be caring for them, they need to learn to chill out.
But basically the process of cleaning out the chicken brooder is:
1. move the chicks to the cardboard box
2. take out the feeder and waterer
3. roll up the dirty newspaper on the bottom
4. take the bin outside and shake out any ucky things left in the bin
5. lay down 4 or 5 pages of fresh newspaper
6. return feeder and waterer, filled if needed
7. replace chicks
The whole process takes maybe 10 minutes, and probably 7 minutes of that time is spent moving chicks from one bin to the other. All said, they're pretty easy to take care of right now, and not very time consuming. I change their bin once a day, and I've decided to do it in the evening, before the sun goes down, so that I am not rushed in the morning and so that I don't disturb their natural sleep patterns by doing it later than dusk.
I noticed that one of the chicks wasn't acting quite right as soon as I got home from work and went to clean the bins. When I walk in the room, all of them freak out a little bit, but one of them didn't. She was asleep at the wall of the brooder, and even when I tapped on the brooder near her, she didn't do more than breathe. She did not protest at all when I picked her up, force-fed her some water, and she began to act mostly normal before I could insist she eat any milky toast. I put her back in with the rest briefly, then wondered if she might be getting beat up by the bigger ones. It was only after I put her back in the brooder that I noticed how much smaller she was than the rest, and I decided to build a hospital for her for the night and isolate her just in case. I cut out the top of a tissue box, put some water in the top of a small round tupperware lid, scattered some food in there, and put the whole rig into the brooder. I figured she would either recover or die, and either way it was best she be isolated for the night.
I then turned my attention to the ducks. The ducks are very time consuming to clean up after. I decided not to take them swimming today, just because it was rainy and therefore kind of chilly, and it was a Monday and I was tired, and I didn't think they necessarily needed it, and I'd just been dealing with the sick/injured chick. I did, however, clean out their bin, also before dusk. Resetting the ducks' bin is a bit messier than is the chicks', and because of the amount of water they spill, it requires more actual cleaning. Whereas the chicks take forever to move from one bin to the cardboard box, the ducks are a snap. They are still a little afraid of me, so there is a little bit of chasing. The whole procedure takes more like 15-20 minutes, and all of the steps for cleaning out the chicks' bin are included, but there are 3 additional steps: I wash their bin out with the hose every day, add 2 inches of pine chips on top of the newspapers, and then add another layer of newspaper and tuck in the chips at the edges -- if I don't tuck it in, the ducklings eat the chips. The wood chips are pretty effective at picking up the excess water, as is the tupperware basin I rigged to sit underneath the waterer. I've found I can roll up the newspapers and chips, minimizing the mess, but it's still necessary to hose it out and carefully assemble the layers, all of which takes time.
They had all curled up together under the heat lamp (after playing in the water for a bit) before I was ready to start cleaning out the bin, so I decided to leave them alone for the night and get up early to do it in the morning.
Cleaning out the chicks' bin is a snap. The hardest part is moving all 16 chickens from the brooder into a cardboard box so that I can clean out the brooder. It's getting harder too, since they're getting bigger and quicker. Occasionally they turn around and peck at my hands, so I've been trying to take the time to hold each one long enough until it settles down in my hands before placing it in the cardboard box. I'm hoping that they will eventually learn that I am not going to harm them, and will stop freaking out when I take the lid off the brooder and try to pick them up. If I am going to be caring for them, they need to learn to chill out.
But basically the process of cleaning out the chicken brooder is:
1. move the chicks to the cardboard box
2. take out the feeder and waterer
3. roll up the dirty newspaper on the bottom
4. take the bin outside and shake out any ucky things left in the bin
5. lay down 4 or 5 pages of fresh newspaper
6. return feeder and waterer, filled if needed
7. replace chicks
The whole process takes maybe 10 minutes, and probably 7 minutes of that time is spent moving chicks from one bin to the other. All said, they're pretty easy to take care of right now, and not very time consuming. I change their bin once a day, and I've decided to do it in the evening, before the sun goes down, so that I am not rushed in the morning and so that I don't disturb their natural sleep patterns by doing it later than dusk.
I noticed that one of the chicks wasn't acting quite right as soon as I got home from work and went to clean the bins. When I walk in the room, all of them freak out a little bit, but one of them didn't. She was asleep at the wall of the brooder, and even when I tapped on the brooder near her, she didn't do more than breathe. She did not protest at all when I picked her up, force-fed her some water, and she began to act mostly normal before I could insist she eat any milky toast. I put her back in with the rest briefly, then wondered if she might be getting beat up by the bigger ones. It was only after I put her back in the brooder that I noticed how much smaller she was than the rest, and I decided to build a hospital for her for the night and isolate her just in case. I cut out the top of a tissue box, put some water in the top of a small round tupperware lid, scattered some food in there, and put the whole rig into the brooder. I figured she would either recover or die, and either way it was best she be isolated for the night.
I then turned my attention to the ducks. The ducks are very time consuming to clean up after. I decided not to take them swimming today, just because it was rainy and therefore kind of chilly, and it was a Monday and I was tired, and I didn't think they necessarily needed it, and I'd just been dealing with the sick/injured chick. I did, however, clean out their bin, also before dusk. Resetting the ducks' bin is a bit messier than is the chicks', and because of the amount of water they spill, it requires more actual cleaning. Whereas the chicks take forever to move from one bin to the cardboard box, the ducks are a snap. They are still a little afraid of me, so there is a little bit of chasing. The whole procedure takes more like 15-20 minutes, and all of the steps for cleaning out the chicks' bin are included, but there are 3 additional steps: I wash their bin out with the hose every day, add 2 inches of pine chips on top of the newspapers, and then add another layer of newspaper and tuck in the chips at the edges -- if I don't tuck it in, the ducklings eat the chips. The wood chips are pretty effective at picking up the excess water, as is the tupperware basin I rigged to sit underneath the waterer. I've found I can roll up the newspapers and chips, minimizing the mess, but it's still necessary to hose it out and carefully assemble the layers, all of which takes time.
They had all curled up together under the heat lamp (after playing in the water for a bit) before I was ready to start cleaning out the bin, so I decided to leave them alone for the night and get up early to do it in the morning.
Day #3: May 15, 2011
I'm still amazed at quick both the ducks and the chicks have developed in the last 2 days. The chicks have continued to develop more and more chicken habits, and I noticed that a few of them seem to be developing at a slightly faster rate than the others. A few of them have been hopping around and flapping their wings, and one or two of them have been squaring off at each other and pecking each other in the face. When I am in the "west wing" where the birds live, I don't see them do this too often to really get my attention, and no one seemed to have any wounds, so I think they might just be trying to figure out who's at the top of the pecking order. Most of them are starting to get what look like real bird feathers on their wings, and their fluff is starting to come off. Even with these changes, the chicks are much less interesting to me than the ducks, who have a lot more personality than the chicks do.
I took the ducks swimming today. I had read that you should wait at least a week to take them swimming, and I had also read forum posts that had people taking ducks swimming as young as 4 days. The risks are that their oil gland isn't fully developed, and they won't be insulated from the water so they get chilled and die, or they just can't swim. Well, my ducklings can definitely swim.
I had a lot of evidence to suggest that they were ready for swimming before I decided to try it. They had made an enormous mess in their water in the morning, and when I watched them, they were splashing it all over themselves and then trying to groom themselves. they went through a quart of water in no time, mainly because they were trying to bathe in it.
I kicked out the killer cat, shut the scared one into the living quarters of the house, and got to work on constructing a swimming pool. Their swimming pool was a plastic wrapping paper bin, which I filled over my kitchen sink and tilted at a slight angle by balancing it on a baking dish on one end, creating a deep end and a shallow end and a ramp they could climb. I made sure the water was just about body temperature, and I set the oven timer for 5:00 minutes.
I put one duckling in at a time to make sure that they couldn't jump out of the deep end and onto my kitchen counter. When I put the first one in, s/he was confused and almost terrified. I set it into the shallow end, and it just looked at me with wet feet as if to say, "What are you doing now? You're not very good at this." I pushed it from the back, it tried to run away from me into the deep end and found it was actually easier to just kick its feet instead of run. It was paddling around the deep end in no time. So, I started the timer, and put the other 4 ducklings in the water. Lefty, who had begun to be off balance when drinking water, was a perfectly fine swimmer. Someone figured out how to dive almost immediately, and was diving under its siblings from end to end. Another one tried to dive, and most decided to at least duck their heads under water and bob while paddling. Super cute baby duck squeeworthy stuff, sprinkled with occasional bursts of "Wow, look how fast you are!"
5 minutes was up and the ducks were still being active and swimming about, but I decided to err on the side of caution and scoop them out and take them back to their brooder before they got chilled or waterlogged. When they got back, they all took to grooming themselves like they had been after they had made such a mess with their water that morning, further validating my decision to take them swimming.
I took the ducks swimming today. I had read that you should wait at least a week to take them swimming, and I had also read forum posts that had people taking ducks swimming as young as 4 days. The risks are that their oil gland isn't fully developed, and they won't be insulated from the water so they get chilled and die, or they just can't swim. Well, my ducklings can definitely swim.
I had a lot of evidence to suggest that they were ready for swimming before I decided to try it. They had made an enormous mess in their water in the morning, and when I watched them, they were splashing it all over themselves and then trying to groom themselves. they went through a quart of water in no time, mainly because they were trying to bathe in it.
I kicked out the killer cat, shut the scared one into the living quarters of the house, and got to work on constructing a swimming pool. Their swimming pool was a plastic wrapping paper bin, which I filled over my kitchen sink and tilted at a slight angle by balancing it on a baking dish on one end, creating a deep end and a shallow end and a ramp they could climb. I made sure the water was just about body temperature, and I set the oven timer for 5:00 minutes.
I put one duckling in at a time to make sure that they couldn't jump out of the deep end and onto my kitchen counter. When I put the first one in, s/he was confused and almost terrified. I set it into the shallow end, and it just looked at me with wet feet as if to say, "What are you doing now? You're not very good at this." I pushed it from the back, it tried to run away from me into the deep end and found it was actually easier to just kick its feet instead of run. It was paddling around the deep end in no time. So, I started the timer, and put the other 4 ducklings in the water. Lefty, who had begun to be off balance when drinking water, was a perfectly fine swimmer. Someone figured out how to dive almost immediately, and was diving under its siblings from end to end. Another one tried to dive, and most decided to at least duck their heads under water and bob while paddling. Super cute baby duck squeeworthy stuff, sprinkled with occasional bursts of "Wow, look how fast you are!"
5 minutes was up and the ducks were still being active and swimming about, but I decided to err on the side of caution and scoop them out and take them back to their brooder before they got chilled or waterlogged. When they got back, they all took to grooming themselves like they had been after they had made such a mess with their water that morning, further validating my decision to take them swimming.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Day #2: May 14, 2011
I got up excited to see if everyone had survived the night. You see, I've never done this before, I have 2 cats, I'm a bit of a forgetful-facer, and I'm sure I'll lose some of them as a result. But not today -- all 21 babies had survived the night! The chicks seemed to be comfortable after I raised the red heat lamp a few inches, and the ducks were still chasing each other and playing in their water. They had played in their water so much, in fact, that there was about a half pint left in the quart jar and a very soggy newspaper.
I took to cleaning out the duck brooder first, moving the ducklings to a cardboard box while I wadded up the newspapers, hosed out the bin, refilled the waterer, and reassembled the entire rig. I also grabbed a flat rock to elevate the waterer about a half inch, putting it more at beak level than as a tempting pool. The ducks seemed pleased with the changes, and I tried adding about an inch of pine bedding to their brooder, mainly to absorb some of their watery mess. Two tried eating the shavings, and they all drug the shavings into the water, where it looked like something tasty, so I modified it a bit. I left the pine bedding but covered it completely with newspapers. The redesign seems to work: the ground is drier, the ducks can still play in the water and not wet their food, and they have a softer surface than plastic lined with newspaper to walk on. They are all very spooked by me, so I make it a point to move slowly, to touch them often, and to talk, whistle, or hum while I'm in the room with them so they can start to get used to human interaction. I tried hand feeding them, but they're too spooked for that right yet.
The chicks might be too stupid to know that I might be a threat, and they don't mind at all if you touch them, so long as you move slowly. It's amazing how much the chicks in particular seem to have developed in terms of chicken-like-habits overnight. Yesterday they were stupid, cute, yellow balls of chirping fluff; today they are hopping around, scratching the ground with their feet, pecking the ground like you'd expect, and flapping their wee little wings. Their brooder was much less of a mess this morning and took half as long to clean out. They hadn't used nearly as much of their water as the ducks, but I asked MrCoven to clean it out and fill it again while I hosed out the bin just to be safe. The chicks waited patiently in the same cardboard box until their brooder had been reset, and then acted a little chilly when I returned them. Once the air heated up again, about 15 minutes later, they were fine and moving all around again. I didn't attempt pine bedding again, and will probably wait until they stop trying to eat their own poop -- they have a very loose definition of what "food" is right now, and until that narrows a bit, I'm not going to give them any opportunity to make fatal mistakes. I picked some fresh grass and threw it down, which seemed to interest the chicks. If I can find a cricket or a beetle, I'll let them play with that too.
So far, both MrCoven and I are very pleased with our decision to raise ducks and chicks.
I took to cleaning out the duck brooder first, moving the ducklings to a cardboard box while I wadded up the newspapers, hosed out the bin, refilled the waterer, and reassembled the entire rig. I also grabbed a flat rock to elevate the waterer about a half inch, putting it more at beak level than as a tempting pool. The ducks seemed pleased with the changes, and I tried adding about an inch of pine bedding to their brooder, mainly to absorb some of their watery mess. Two tried eating the shavings, and they all drug the shavings into the water, where it looked like something tasty, so I modified it a bit. I left the pine bedding but covered it completely with newspapers. The redesign seems to work: the ground is drier, the ducks can still play in the water and not wet their food, and they have a softer surface than plastic lined with newspaper to walk on. They are all very spooked by me, so I make it a point to move slowly, to touch them often, and to talk, whistle, or hum while I'm in the room with them so they can start to get used to human interaction. I tried hand feeding them, but they're too spooked for that right yet.
The chicks might be too stupid to know that I might be a threat, and they don't mind at all if you touch them, so long as you move slowly. It's amazing how much the chicks in particular seem to have developed in terms of chicken-like-habits overnight. Yesterday they were stupid, cute, yellow balls of chirping fluff; today they are hopping around, scratching the ground with their feet, pecking the ground like you'd expect, and flapping their wee little wings. Their brooder was much less of a mess this morning and took half as long to clean out. They hadn't used nearly as much of their water as the ducks, but I asked MrCoven to clean it out and fill it again while I hosed out the bin just to be safe. The chicks waited patiently in the same cardboard box until their brooder had been reset, and then acted a little chilly when I returned them. Once the air heated up again, about 15 minutes later, they were fine and moving all around again. I didn't attempt pine bedding again, and will probably wait until they stop trying to eat their own poop -- they have a very loose definition of what "food" is right now, and until that narrows a bit, I'm not going to give them any opportunity to make fatal mistakes. I picked some fresh grass and threw it down, which seemed to interest the chicks. If I can find a cricket or a beetle, I'll let them play with that too.
So far, both MrCoven and I are very pleased with our decision to raise ducks and chicks.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Day #1: May 13, 2011
My chicks were shipped from Missouri on Wednesday, May 11th.
I got a call from the post office around 9:00am that my chicks and ducklings were in! I had hoped they would be delivered on Friday. I explained that no one would be home during the day, but that I would come pick them up after work and before close at 4:30.
They came in quite a small box for my having ordered 21 total baby birds: 15 Buff Orpington pullets and 6 Rouen unsexed ducklings. I had anticipated that I might lose some in transit: Missouri to Northern Pennsylvania is a long trip for anyone, let alone a day-old chick. When we opened the box we saw that we had indeed lost one duckling. Everybody else was alert and very chirpy, so we proceeded to get the chicks settled.
I had built 2 brooders -- one for each species -- loosely following the directions found here -- the weekend prior. Well, I had built one brooder and it was so quick and easy that MrCoven cut the lid out to build the other while I got the ducks and chicks settled. "Settling" them consisted of lining the bottom of the plastic bin with newspapers (yet another use of what's left of my 30 copies of November 11, 2010's New York Times), filling up the water bottles with body-temperature water, filling the feeders with food, and then putting the chicks one by one into the brooder. I had hung the lamp a few days prior, and I only needed to adjust it after I saw the chicks acting like it was too hot for them in there. I put all 21 babies in the one complete brooder while we assembled the second and hung the light.
The ducklings and chicks seem to get along pretty well together by and large, and I hear that once they are full grown, they can share living quarters. The danger now in keeping them together is twofold: ducks are messy and can give diseases to the chicks, and the ducks put on weight more quickly and can inadvertently hurt a significantly smaller chick. One of the ducks was acting quite aggressively towards a few chicks, seeming to chase them down and butt them with its beak, but as soon as we separated the two species, the angry duckling disappeared and 5 hungry ducklings were all that remained. I'm sure being cooped up in a cardboard box, in the dark, with weird noises and 20 other creatures would make me cranky too.
I was not expecting there to be as huge a difference between the two species as there clearly is: I was assuming that baby birds were basically baby birds. Not the case.
Chicks are really, really, extremely stupid. The first thing we did was dunk the chicks' heads under water until they had to gulp, to teach them how to drink water and where their water is. We did that for all 16 chicks -- that's right, 16 chicks! I guess you get a kind of farmers' dozen when you order them, maybe in case one of the girls turns out to be a boy. Anyway, they drank a lot of water right away -- maybe close to a pint between them.
Chicks are also too stupid to know what is food and what is, say, bedding. It became immediately apparent that the pine shavings would have to wait, since several chicks tried to eat them. I scooped the chicks out, scooped out the handful of shavings, and moved on to actually feeding them. To do that, I threw a handful of non-medicated poulty starter on top of the newspapers, and they proceeded to eat both the feed and any poop that had started to accumulate. Whatever floats your boat, stupid chicks. Soon enough, though, they migrated over to the feeder, even though the Cackle Hatchery guide doesn't suggest giving them a feeder the first day.
The ducklings immediately demonstrated a ton more personality than the chicks. One of the surviving 5 ducklings likes to look at you out of his/her left eye, cocking its head in a quizzical fashion. It has full mobility of its head, can groom itself properly, has no balance issues, and is not being ostracized by the other ducklings. I suspect that it has a congenital spinal wonkiness (much like the cat in Owego we lovingly referred to as "Crooked Head" who was also quite adept at taking care of itself), so I'm keeping my eye on it to see if it has any issues. So far, the only noticeable effect has been an increase in the cuteness. The other 4 are completely indecipherable.
The ducklings are definitely messier than the chicks. While the chicks have to be taught how to drink, the ducks immediately took to the waterer and began not only to drink, but to play. All 5 prefer to walk in their waterer and throw water off the tips of their beaks at each other, the walls, me, whatever. As a result about half of the duck brooder's newspaper lining was wet almost immediately. They will clearly take more care than the chicks.
The ducklings have a couple of silly habits, too: they tilt their heads beak-up to drink water. They scurry around together as a 5-some if you move too quickly. They yawn. They stretch their legs after a 3-minute cat, err, duckling nap. They're super cute. Once I picked up Lefty to examine him/her more closely, and s/he started cheeping very, very loudly. One of the remaining 4 in the brooder advanced from the duckling-huddle and eyed me as if to say, "Whaddup, woman? Whatcha doin to my sib? Do I need to intervene?" I put Lefty back, and the 5 blurred into one ball of brown and yellow cuteness again.
I checked on them several times during the evening to make sure that they were still happy with their new living conditions, which they appeared to be.
I got a call from the post office around 9:00am that my chicks and ducklings were in! I had hoped they would be delivered on Friday. I explained that no one would be home during the day, but that I would come pick them up after work and before close at 4:30.
They came in quite a small box for my having ordered 21 total baby birds: 15 Buff Orpington pullets and 6 Rouen unsexed ducklings. I had anticipated that I might lose some in transit: Missouri to Northern Pennsylvania is a long trip for anyone, let alone a day-old chick. When we opened the box we saw that we had indeed lost one duckling. Everybody else was alert and very chirpy, so we proceeded to get the chicks settled.
I had built 2 brooders -- one for each species -- loosely following the directions found here -- the weekend prior. Well, I had built one brooder and it was so quick and easy that MrCoven cut the lid out to build the other while I got the ducks and chicks settled. "Settling" them consisted of lining the bottom of the plastic bin with newspapers (yet another use of what's left of my 30 copies of November 11, 2010's New York Times), filling up the water bottles with body-temperature water, filling the feeders with food, and then putting the chicks one by one into the brooder. I had hung the lamp a few days prior, and I only needed to adjust it after I saw the chicks acting like it was too hot for them in there. I put all 21 babies in the one complete brooder while we assembled the second and hung the light.
The ducklings and chicks seem to get along pretty well together by and large, and I hear that once they are full grown, they can share living quarters. The danger now in keeping them together is twofold: ducks are messy and can give diseases to the chicks, and the ducks put on weight more quickly and can inadvertently hurt a significantly smaller chick. One of the ducks was acting quite aggressively towards a few chicks, seeming to chase them down and butt them with its beak, but as soon as we separated the two species, the angry duckling disappeared and 5 hungry ducklings were all that remained. I'm sure being cooped up in a cardboard box, in the dark, with weird noises and 20 other creatures would make me cranky too.
I was not expecting there to be as huge a difference between the two species as there clearly is: I was assuming that baby birds were basically baby birds. Not the case.
Chicks are really, really, extremely stupid. The first thing we did was dunk the chicks' heads under water until they had to gulp, to teach them how to drink water and where their water is. We did that for all 16 chicks -- that's right, 16 chicks! I guess you get a kind of farmers' dozen when you order them, maybe in case one of the girls turns out to be a boy. Anyway, they drank a lot of water right away -- maybe close to a pint between them.
Chicks are also too stupid to know what is food and what is, say, bedding. It became immediately apparent that the pine shavings would have to wait, since several chicks tried to eat them. I scooped the chicks out, scooped out the handful of shavings, and moved on to actually feeding them. To do that, I threw a handful of non-medicated poulty starter on top of the newspapers, and they proceeded to eat both the feed and any poop that had started to accumulate. Whatever floats your boat, stupid chicks. Soon enough, though, they migrated over to the feeder, even though the Cackle Hatchery guide doesn't suggest giving them a feeder the first day.
The ducklings immediately demonstrated a ton more personality than the chicks. One of the surviving 5 ducklings likes to look at you out of his/her left eye, cocking its head in a quizzical fashion. It has full mobility of its head, can groom itself properly, has no balance issues, and is not being ostracized by the other ducklings. I suspect that it has a congenital spinal wonkiness (much like the cat in Owego we lovingly referred to as "Crooked Head" who was also quite adept at taking care of itself), so I'm keeping my eye on it to see if it has any issues. So far, the only noticeable effect has been an increase in the cuteness. The other 4 are completely indecipherable.
The ducklings are definitely messier than the chicks. While the chicks have to be taught how to drink, the ducks immediately took to the waterer and began not only to drink, but to play. All 5 prefer to walk in their waterer and throw water off the tips of their beaks at each other, the walls, me, whatever. As a result about half of the duck brooder's newspaper lining was wet almost immediately. They will clearly take more care than the chicks.
The ducklings have a couple of silly habits, too: they tilt their heads beak-up to drink water. They scurry around together as a 5-some if you move too quickly. They yawn. They stretch their legs after a 3-minute cat, err, duckling nap. They're super cute. Once I picked up Lefty to examine him/her more closely, and s/he started cheeping very, very loudly. One of the remaining 4 in the brooder advanced from the duckling-huddle and eyed me as if to say, "Whaddup, woman? Whatcha doin to my sib? Do I need to intervene?" I put Lefty back, and the 5 blurred into one ball of brown and yellow cuteness again.
I checked on them several times during the evening to make sure that they were still happy with their new living conditions, which they appeared to be.
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