happy and sad post

[chickmomma03]

Something got my neighbor's male duck and did some real damage, it survived, barely, but the injuries were so extensive he had to be culled. The female duck is hurt, but thankfully not bad at all. I think the male was trying to protect her so he suffered the worst of it. There's a really long story to what happened after but I'm too tired right now to type everything out. The female is confined safely. She had 2 eggs in her nest, and literally popped out a 3rd after I caught her and handed her to her owner. No, I'm not kidding, an egg came flying out and hit the ground. I'm not 100% sure on fertility BUT I have them in a makeshift incubator for now, it's worth a try. I really need to make something better and am going to get to work quickly on it, but for now the eggs are in a fish tank with a screen on top, towels covering the worst of the draft, no water right now because humidity is high right now, and a light in there. Temp is taking time to come up, but it should get there.

My neighbor isn't happy about having to cull the male, but he didn't have a choice, the male was in bad shape.

 

[Orca5094]

Aww, that's so sad your neighbor lost their male. :/ Just remember though, that the female's eggs can still be fertile for up to 3 weeks after mating with a male, so you may want to gather more eggs for a bit before incubating so you can possibly hatch out more of their offspring. Not sure if she'll lay more after such a trauma though, but if it were me I'd wait about a week and get as many more eggs from her as possible before incubating. That would also give you more time to get an incubator, or make up a better one with better temperature and humidity control.

 

[chickmomma03]

The 2 from the nest I'm not sure how many days it's been since lay (she thought it had been at least several days) so I'm tossing them into my incubator (I just spent the morning making one, running a temp/humidity check now) since it's kind of a crap shoot. I can make another if I need to for other eggs. Since one literally popped out and landed on the ground I'm not sure it's going to be viable. It didn't look like it "scrambled" or anything on the inside, but I don't know yet. I'm firm on writing my information down so I'll know what goes with what, and I marked eggs for identification.

I put the duck in my mini coop I built because her leg is hurt, and we didn't want anything to happen to her too. She was really hard to catch, but I did it. It's not a permanent solution, but it will work for now (it was built for chicks, so it needs to be modified but right now it will work). My mini coop is in their yard, I had help getting it over the fence, had to fix a couple things too, but it's secure now (it was until someone decided to grow impatient with me and just flip it over causing damage, I'm irritated about that still, I worked hard on it).

Basically here's the story. The ducks had shelter areas, but no official housing yet (they were working on it, and the ducks had plenty of hiding/sleeping places). Things were fine for months and months. The female was laying wherever though, so I built a nesting box. I put it under the fort for the playset so she'd feel comfortable using it. Unfortunately, yesterday or night before (we strongly suspect night attack since NO ONE heard anything, including myself, and I hear pretty much everything, not that I'm nosy, we're just close enough for me to) something attacked the male duck, and it was so bad he had to be put down. I suspect he was protecting the female. I also suspect it was a hawk or owl. I was working with the neighbors to try and come up with a solution before that, but they both work full time, and it's NOT my place to just go into their yard and do whatever I want or I would have been happy to build something for them.

After inspecting further on the female this morning when I went to grab my staple gun I forgot over there, and fixing a few minor things I missed last night on the mini coop, we were able to see some more minor injuries on Tabby. We're going to try to clean up her wounds today, but she needs a little more time to settle first. We're going to get some antibiotic ointment or something on it (if we can find blu kote we'll use that).

 

[Orca5094]

Ok, sounds like you have things handled pretty well there now. How is the female doing today? Have you gotten any more eggs from her?

Oh, and if you use antibiotic ointment on her, you'll want to use the kind without painkiller (the ones that end in -caine are the bad ones).

 

[chickmomma03]

The duck was doing good today. I have 4 in the incubator, she laid another yesterday and since it was still so early I just put it in with the others. I am keeping track and since they are marked I can expect that one to be a day behind the others.

 

[Orca5094]

Good luck with the eggs! Come back and let us know how it goes.

The female is still doing ok now?

 

[chickmomma03]

Female is doing good. I am a little ticked off this morning. I lost 1 embryo, 1 is still doing good, and 2 are questionable.