August09

Saturday, 1st

The soggy wet weather is continuing .............

In spite of this John did me the favour this morning [I'm still worn out from two days of "heavy" topiary clipping] of cleaning out both duck huts and lighting a fire near the donkey shelter with all duck-hut-emptyings waiting in bags. The fire is smouldering away very well in spite of the wet.

As far as I know the 7-group have not repeated their visit to the duck pond even though the enclosure has been left open every day. I won't push them - they'll join forces again when they're ready.

Other visitors at the duck pond seem to have got less during last month; I don't see so many jackdaws or pheasants now, and as for the mallards - they must have disappeared into their bachelor groups again because I saw THREE lady mallards on and around the pond last Tuesday evening and 2 of them early on Friday.

Of waterhens I've only seen two recently, and I must presume them to be the parents of the one surviving chick [from 3 broods which all took place somewhere along the ditch, not on our "island" in the duck pond]. I believe this to be the chick rescued from the cat, because 3 days ago John saw this chick crawling, rather than walking or running, in the bog garden adjoining the pond and creeping underneath a tuft of grass to hide. It swims very well, though, as I've seen the chick swimming with the parents in the pond and in the flooded ditch, and last night I hang back after putting the ducks to bed and could see the ckick plopping out of the reeds on the island to greet the parents coming back.

That seems to be all the news for now; I'll take photos again when it stops raining!

Sunday, 2nd August 2009

Well hurrah. a rain-free day! Something to savour. Had a lovely surprise this morning, too. I decided to go down to the duck pond without first putting the hose on - the sound of which always alerts the waterhens and I can see them disappearing behind the logs as I come along with the food container. So, as I said, I didn't turn on the water ........ and was rewarded by the sight of the waterhen baby running like the clappers and taking cover in the bog garden while one of its parents hid in the potato patch and the other one leapt into the branches overhead.

So, if this really is the chick that was rescued from the cat next door then whatever injury it had has healed. I was delighted anyway to see it running.

I didn't do very well with my photographic efforts when I went down later to replenish the water buckets. After filling them I crouched down low hoping the waterhens would come back. Instead, after some time, I could hear a parent calling the chick. Then I saw that it had been on the "island" all the time as it was swimming furiously towards the logs and vanished in a gap between them. I snapped more in hope than expectation, and you can just see the little one disappearing where the arrow points:

In this second cut-out you can see the path it made through the water. Sorry the photos aren't any clearer - I'll try again some time.

I'm really pleased with the way our planting of nasturtiums, oregano, mint and grass has held up to wear, this is the best the pond has looked. Three more photos now of Captain feathering up again after the early moult, of him and his 3 girls enjoying the bubbles from the water hose, and the last one of the ditch behind and below the pond overflowing with water. I do hope it will deter the cats from coming too close as I have seen the little family of waterhens swimming in it.

Sunday, 9th August 2009

We actually had sunshine yesterday and today, and the past week has not been too horrible as regards the weather.

However, something else that's horrible has been worrying us: rat activity. I suppose we must assume they're always around in the countryside, but we've seen them to-ing and fro-ing so much in the last couple of weeks that we bought an electronic rat killer ......... I'm against using poison. John set it up a couple of days ago, but as far as I know we haven't caught any yet.

Moving the duck food to a different position, nearer the house, hadn't stopped the vermin from helping themselves. These two photos were taken on 2nd August - I had seen two rats just before but they kept away while I had the camera.

But 3 days later I snapped one of them from the upstairs window. It was not at all concerned and spent about quarter of an hour there. The day before, at the evening meal, I had presented the two groups of ducks with one of their favourite foods: rice. I had mixed up some cottage cheese with the rice, it's supposed to be good for them, AND I'd put it on a white plastic tray - BIG MISTAKE! You know what our ducks are like "don't know it, don't like it, won't eat it; what's more, that white thing might bite back."

The bottom group eventually ate it, don't know if they had help. This top lot absolutely refused and didn't touch it in the evening nor the next day. So in the afternoon I emptied the rice/cottage cheese mix under the birch so other birds could have it and it wouldn't go to waste entirely. That is the pile of white you can see under the birch, the rat loved it!:

One or two of the ducks made as if to chase the rat away but didn't quite dare. Blob, in the photo on the left, looks as if he's about to have a go ............. but then he went and chased a jackdaw instead. At least they move when he threatens them!

With the ducks all gone the rat continued to tackle the pile of rice, and it looked as if it went to bury some of it at the foot of those two birch stems. After a good 15 minutes it went and John came and swept the rice away - don't want to contaminate anyone.

Monday, 10th August 2009 Remembering Gerd and my father's birthday today, and wishing Alan Hitchcock a speedy recovery [are you out of hospital yet?]

No, we've not caught a rat, in fact we haven't even seen one for 2 or 3 days - did the electronic trap scare them away??

I've not had sight of the little waterhen for several days, either, but John tells me he saw it when he was mowing the grass down there on Saturday, and it had grown quite a bit and it was running fast.

I'd like to raise a subject today which I've only recently been made aware of myself, and hope to bring to the attention of as many current and prospective duck keepers as possible: the health dangers with crested ducks.

Mike Ashton wrote an illuminating article about them in the Summer 2009 Newsletter of the Indian Runner Duck Association entitled "Is There A Limit? I'll quote a section of it so you have an idea of what it's about:

"[Bartels] describes how the crests of the ducks (like those of chickens) are made up of enlarged contour and down feathers. They arise from an area of thickened material below the skin at the back of the skull. This can develop into a protuberance of adipose and connective tissue if the crests are sufficiently voluminous. The roof of the skull also shows signs of numerous perforations. The bones (calvaria) are often not closed in crested ducks. There are holes in the skull.

It was once thought that connective tissue and fat protruded into the cranial cavity as the direct result of the increase of fat deposits and the build up of the cushion beneath the skin. On the contrary, Bartels discovered that even birds with intact calvaria, as well as the plain-headed offspring of crested ducks, developed large bodies of fat inside the cranium. In other words, they had fatty tumours within the skull. These are known as 'lipomas'. Moreover, the study showed that such (intracranial) lipomas only occur in domestic ducks that have at least one parent descending from specimens with feather crests. The effects of the fatty tumour were shown not only in fhe formation of feather crests but also in the reduction in size of some parts of the brain, notably the olfactory bulb and cerebellum. Compression of the brain is considered to be a cause of sensory malfunctions such as blindness and disorder of balance.

Worse still are some of the other side effects of this lethal gene. I have seen photographs of dead ducklings with brain hernias, hypoplasia (malformation) of the upper bill, and duplication of some body parts. These images are not at all pleasant, but I am sure potential breeders of crested ducks would find them instructive."

As I said, I had no idea of these serious problems with crested ducks. I never liked them myself but know that lots of people think them pretty or cute or funny. I had occasion to translate an article by Professor Wolfgang Rudolph who believes that, with modern technology, it should be possible to select crest carriers for breeding which do not develop fatty deposits, and he quotes very modern and expensive methods [e.g. magnetic resonance tomography] which allow even live animals to be examined for potentially lethal defects. He therefore recommends collaboration between scientists and breeders in order to achieve healthy crest-carrying birds.

I wrote to Mike Ashton in response to his article and to what Professor Rudolph said, believing that in today’s economic climate it would be very unlikely that monies could be made available to fund the necessary research and testing equipment - after all we’re already almost 200 billion in debt. And even if the funds were there, how long would the research take, what would happen in between? How many irresponsible breeders are out there who put “fashion” and customers’ demands before bird welfare? Mike wrote back with this insight ............

What I tried to do in the original article was question whether it was at all necessary to add additional burdens to already 'distorted' breeds. Many European Runners find even walking difficult and Calls are at the extreme edge of miniaturization. Is it fair to keep encouraging fresh breeds with added burdens? I feel somewhat uncomfortable with the thought that we are creating 'freaks' that inherit unnecessary suffering. Perhaps breeders should ease off a little until we find ways of ameliorating the situation, disentangling the crested gene from its linked lethality (as Rudolph optimistically dreams).

......... which expresses my thoughts better than I could do, and which I hope will make breeders and duck aficionados alike think very hard about the breeding of “funny”/”comical”/”fashionable” ducks of whom nobody knows what inherited horrors they might be harbouring.

Sunday, 16th August 2009 A very happy birthday to Pearl [in America with her son Paul and family]

We've had quite an exciting week, not with the ducks, no, they're fine, but the ceiling fell in a bit in the house!

I exaggerate. It was Thursday morning, John was about to do something about the loft ladder I'd bought a while ago. "Come and look at this", he said, and looking up at the ceiling in the stairwell there were several cracks and damp patches. To cut a long story short, John found out that a pipe near the water tank in the loft had been leaking out of several holes for some time and saturated the insulation granules the previous house owners had used. Scooping those wet granules out into containers for me to carry down and dispose of took some time, and all of a sudden a great patch of plaster fell down and with it a huge amount of these wet and dirty granules .................... and they made a horrible mess upstairs and down and it took most of the day to clear it up!

So that was Thursday. Then yesterday, I thought it was about time I pulled out some of the huge weeds in our "wild flower patch" near the big duck pond. I had already filled 2 great barrow-loads from an area of just 3 by 1 metres when Richard from next door came by with his delightful little grandson Jack [whose first word on every visit is "ducks!"]. So, to please Jack I decided to dig up a few worms to make the ducks come running, and that worked very well and also pleased these two little moulting customers:

When returning to my garden fork a little later I found there was a great cloud of bees around the handle, I thought I must have disturbed their nest when digging for worms. John came to have a look and reckoned they were wasps - but did wasps make nests in the ground?

I posted the question - with photos - on the German duck forum and got an answer after lunch. Soil wasps did indeed exist and the best hope to make them relocate was to direct a stream of water into the single entrance between sundown and sunrise. Hmmmmm......

We took a look from a distance at the fork handle from time to time and they were still there.

I wanted a bigger photo of the wasps, but this was as close as I dared go; I was anyhow lying on my belly and the little beasties were attacking me. So I left them to it and did something else in the garden.

John, however, later in the afternoon, wanted to mow that strip of grass, moved the fork out of the way - and got stung!

The wasps were still there at quarter past eight when we were putting the ducks in. John saw them going in and under in the direction of the grass verge. No, we didn't squirt water down the hole; we thought we'd leave them to calm down.

I'll have to be careful when I do some planting there [had an excessive shopping spree yesterday afternoon at Staunton Harold Nurseries and bought loads of "fillers" for where I'd been clearing weeds!]

Thursday, 20th August 2009

On Monday night Candida would not come out of the pond to join the other 3 for bedtime. I threw lots of little lumps of soil, even hit her once, splashed the water - she stubbornly stopped on the water.

So I left them to it and put the top lot into their hut. As John is always out Monday nights I very nearly asked our neighbour for help, but then hit on the idea of tying a long net to the extended garden lopper. When I swept that across the pond Candida went out in a panic .................... and then I saw that she couldn't walk. She hobbled, flopped down on her belly, hobbled, flopped again, until she managed to heave herself into the hut. I have no idea how she hurt herself. I could surmise that Blob went down on one of his raids and that she injured her right leg while getting away from him, but I just don't know.

On the three mornings since then Candida has followed the others out of the hut, half hobbling, half belly-flopping, and into the water as fast as she could, then spending all day on the water. To make sure that she could eat I've put a flat tray weighed down with a brick at water level, and mixed pasta and potato with the normal grain and chopped up comfrey leaves. Comfrey is known as "Beinwell" in German, meaning it's used in the treatment of leg injuries. It was a bit more difficult to get drinking water to Candida to which I'd added comfrey tea, but I dangled a small water bucket into the pond from a stake yesterday morning, so she could reach. The first time I put the low tray of food down for her I could watch her eat greedily, so she must have missed out before.

Last night when she came out of the pond [had to use the sweeping net again] I thought she seemed a bit easier, and tonight she did not belly-flop at all, just limped until she got to the step into the hut. I was also heartened during the day when I saw she was out of the pond and sunning herself on the bank .......... no, it wasn't too hot a day, mostly cloudy and fine rain in the morning and very stormy in the afternoon; the sun just came out for brief periods.

I took a few photos yesterday - that's Hedda below
helping herself from the tray:

You may wonder why I didn't take her to the vet's right away, but on the two occasions when I did take ducks to the vet's they finished up dead after treatment, the memory still lingers on. It's hard finding a vet specializing in poultry. But the signs for Candida's leg getting better are good.

Friday, 21st August 2009

A happy little update on Candida: this morning she came barging out of the hut with the others and RAN to the pond without flopping down once. Ok, she was still limping heavily, but she ran!

During the day both John and I heard her complaining noisily when the other three had deserted her to go foraging into the field or flower beds; which I thought was a very good sign as she'd been awfully quiet the days before.

And tonight, big surprise! As we went to shut them in at just gone 8 there was Candida at the top of the garden limping along with the others. Captain, Hedda and Anabelle went off to the hut, and as Candida could not keep up I managed to catch her at last and take a look at her right foot. In a couple of places there looked to be something like blisters, but not watery, just kind of spongy and white, like skin that had been in the water too long. John went off for a tube of antiseptic tea tree oil and smeared some on - hope it helps. I'll try and find out some more about those white bits under her foot tomorrow, but well done Candida for making it all the way up to the top fence!

Saturday evening, 22nd August 2009

After last night's surprise of finding Candida at the top of their enclosure I went down prepared tonight. I had the tea tree oil in my pocket and the camera around my shoulder in the hope of getting a close-up shot of her foot, to find out if somebody else had seen something like it.

Well, you can be as prepared as you like .... all four of them were on the water. And all four got out without urging and Candida overtook the others - still limping but not as bad - and was FIRST in the hut! She was making sure she was NOT going to be picked up today.

I wasn't feeling too good today, but I had to laugh. There's a nice saying in German for this kind of situation: "Denn erstens kommt es anders, und zweitens als man denkt" - things turning out different from what you had expected. So no photo tonight, sorry!

Friday, 28th August 2009

Candida has still got her limp. If she's not lost it soon I shall have to try and find a suitable vet after all. In the mornings she's out like a flash with the others. I was there with the camera, ready, this morning, and still missed taking a shot of her running. All I got was a whooooossh into the water:

Candida is second from the right - she was quick!

I took a couple more photos while I had the camera with me. It was difficult to get a shot of her limping, but you can probably see in her posture on these two photos that she's trying to compensate for her poorly leg:

The red jug contains comfrey tea ... I was putting it into all the water buckets this morning; it can only do good.

Thought I'd take a couple of pictures of the other mob on my way back. I was topping up the frog pond and could see that the 7 enjoy water bubbles as much as the duck-pond-four. As soon as Decibels spotted me creeping up with the camera, though, she left the bubbles and kept her eye on me:

Alastair came with the big gang mower today and did the fields. John tells me that, while the fences were down for the mowing, he saw all 11 ducks together! I'm pleased, I like to see them all together.