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| Junebug and some of her adopted babies. |
She had gone broody this spring, meaning she was laying
on eggs all day trying to hatch out some chicks. The poor dumb bird doesn’t
realize that we don’t have a rooster and therefore none of those eggs could
become anything but breakfast. Having a broody hen isn’t really a good thing,
because she protects the eggs and pecks at us when we try to collect them, and
eventually she stops laying new eggs altogether. But we were able to put Junebug’s
broodiness to good use: Mike’s mom brought over a pile of recently laid ducks
eggs that her friend had obtained. The mother duck had been chased off my a dog and abandoned them. We slipped them underneath Junebug to see if they
would hatch, and two days later, we had six cute little ducklings living in the
coop! There’s actually one chick in the mix, too. A (fertilized) chicken egg
got mixed in somewhere along the duck eggs’ journey.
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| One of the bravest ducklings, venturing out of his own to get some grub. |
Sadly, there were eight ducklings originally, but it appears that Junebug accidentally suffocated two of them. The nest box is small, and she’s inexperienced at being a mother. We’re really hoping that there are no more casualties.
We’ll keep the ducklings with the chickens and let Junebug
raise them until they’re adults. Mike’s mom has done this before, and she said that one day when the ducks are grown up, they all just fly
away. But sometimes they stop by again the following year on their migration
path.
