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.
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