Thanks for all of the advice and the complements to Ida!
Pomeranian and Embden, eh? Interesting. I've always wondered.
No gander, just Ida.
The pond was built for Ida a couple of years ago... and then for the first 6 months she wouldn't go near it! I dug up a goodly proportion of my backyard for her benefit, and she wouldn't even drink out of it! It took visiting wild ducks swimming around in it for about a week to convince her it wasn't infested with pond-monsters. For the first six years she only had a tiny pool that she could just float in if it was full and if she lifted her feet right up (and she'd pretty much empty it any time she had a decent bath), so it's lovely to watch her swimming around now with her feet trailing out behind her, or trying to swim underwater to catch the fish (a spectacle I can only liken to a slow buoyant torpedo with a terrible sense of direction), or having a good thorough goose-bath.
She did have a clutch of 12 eggs this year -- I got a turkey a few months ago, and she's taken over Ida's usual nest-site as a dust bath and general hang-out, and Ida's always been foraging or swimming when I go outside, so between those two things I didn't realise she'd started laying -- but I took them all once I found them (the same day I posted my question). Kind of wish now that I hadn't
, although my egg-eating friends who every year ask "is she laying yet? is she laying yet?" are happy I did (I don't eat them myself, for a whole bunch of reasons, but I've never had any trouble getting rid of them).
I've tried letting her set a clutch of 9 before, but that was right at the end of nesting season and heading into 40°C (100°F) days and... the eggs went off, and there was an explosion (which was very stinky and a bit traumatic for us both!). I think next year I'll try letting her set a clutch at the start of the season and see what happens.
She won't eat layer pellets. Don't know why. She will eat finisher pellets, though, if they're stirred through the grain mix, and I figure that's better than nothing? She also eats the shells off of any snails that she finds (not the poor old snail, just his shell), and as many worms as I can find for her (during nesting season she gets really excited when she sees me with the spade -- worms! -- but won't even touch them the rest of the year), and her and the wild ducks tear the pond apart looking for fish and frog eggs in the reed beds and water grasses. She does get thin when she goes broody, and looks a bit scruffy because she's also moulting at the same time, but she's never lost so much condition that she's gotten weak or had trouble walking and she bounces back pretty fast once the broody wears off, so I'm hoping that's good signs that her diet is pretty much okay. 40 eggs is a big strain on her body though, and I worry about calcium in particular as the shells are very very thick and that's got to come from somewhere.
As she won't eat the layer pellets, are there any calcium supplements that are suitable?
