This Summer, Stuart fixed the old concrete pond that used to be filled with weeds and built a duck house/pen to provide our friends with a much-desired waterhole.
Moving the ducks from the coop to the pen wasn't as easy as I thought. These ducks are extremely skittish and shy and therefore, instead of traumatizing them by trying to catch them I thought we could just neatly shew them towards their new pen through a coral. Not so easy. The whole thing turned into a comedy of errors and we were chasing ducks all over the place. The ordeal catapulted the birds into a molt and they instantly stopped laying, which threw a wrench into our plan of having them raise some ducklings for us to eat (we still haven't gotten our hands on an incubator.)
Indiana, Gwendolyn and Batman loved learning how to swim in their pond! They say that it's easier for a drake to mate in water. After a long two-month molting period, Indiana started laying again and instantly set up a nest and began setting. Gwendolyn quickly got the picture and followed suit. After about 30 days of exhausting setting (ducks sit on their nest all day and all night, with only about 10-15 minutes' break to go eat and drink), the little ones hatched - what a magical sight to behold!
Out of approximately 35 eggs between the both of them, 14 hatched, and 11 ducklings survived. These little ducklings took to the water instantly (it is said that ducklings hatched in an incubator cannot go into water when they are young as they will get chilled, but ducklings reared by their mothers get a protective coating from mom which renders their feathers waterproof).
Both ducks and even the drake were endearingly good parents, protecting them from me, herding them together, letting them eat before themselves, teaching them to muck about in the mud, showing them the ropes so to speak....
And they grew - astonishingly fast! Which meant that their time was coming.... a chilling thought at first. The problem with ducklings is that as they grow, so does the amount of duck poo in the pen and pond. Anyone who has raised ducks will tell you what filthy creatures they truly are. They poo copiously and their excrement stinks like nothing else... So after a while, I just couldn't wait to go through with the butchering.
Catching these young birds was even more heart-wrenching than catching the chickens because these were my darling ducks' children! And just as they were good parents in rearing their young, so were they at trying to shield them from capture. They painstakingly tried to protect them from me and it broke my heart to steal them away. It was so sad and awful that I decided to be a kind killer and leave them two of their daughters. It just seemed too cruel to have them do all this work and be left with nothing but terrible feelings of fear and pointlessness. Call me crazy. That just means that we'll get more duck eggs this winter.
Nine ducks were slaughtered and eight of them are resting in the freezer. The ninth will be cooked as Stuart's birthday dinner in a cranberry and orange sauce. The skins of the younger ducklings have been rendered into fat (since their feathers were virtually impossible to pluck and they had to be skinned). Their heads are drying outside in the sun (I think Stuart wants to make art with them). Their stunningly beautiful feathers are being saved for some later artful use as well. Their giblets' fate is to be used in my very first terrine (which is a kind of pate). Their feet have fed the dogs and their guts are feeding the compost.
But by and by, my husband echos my feelings when he says "gosh, killing them wouldn't be so hard if they didn't make them so darn beautiful!"
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