Much ado about nothing - the ducks rattled my cage a bit today.

[Tevyes Dad]

I am writing this so you can all snicker at me because I KNOW most of you have been here before.

I went into down to do some errands for a couple hours. One of the errands was to get some lettuce for the ducks. When I got home, I took some of the lettuce out back and sat with the ducks. Tevye came up for some lettuce and I noticed some blood on the web of his foot. I followed it up his leg and around his side and his feathers near his leg were covered with blood!

OMG! Something must have got in the yard and attacked him while I was gone. I caught him and took him inside and put him in the bath tub and started drawing him a bath so I could clean him up. While the bath was filling, I got a dog crate around so I could transport him to the vet / isolate him depending on the circumstances. I went to my security system and started looking for what happened. After the first couple minutes didn't show much, I decided to see what the damage was first so I would know if I needed the vet or not. I got some triple antibiotic ointment ready (that can never hurt) and went into the bathroom. Took Tevye out of the tub and put him on a towel, then got down with him on the floor. I turned him over. At first I couldn't see anything, just blood all over his feathers. I combed through them a while and still didn't see anything. Then I saw he had ripped his dew claw off his back toe. Not much damage, but a lot of blood. Whew! was I relieved. I put some triple antibiotic ointment on it and set him back out with the rest of the flock. We will watch it carefully until it is fully healed, but wow that was scary. Here is a picture after his bath:



it was much worse looking before...

Well Yvonne got home and we fed the ducks some treats and laughed about how we had a big scare that turned out to be nothing. A little later, I decided that our Pekin, Snow, needed some lap time, so we caught her and were petting her and I noticed a HUGE lump on the bottom of her bill right near her throat. I pointed it out to my wife and she touched it and said it was kind of soft. We took a picture of it so we could post it on the forum to see if any of you could identify the malady:



Every time we touched it, she seemed to shy away and didn't like it at all which really concerned me because ducks are pretty tough and I have seen them go through things that I know were painful with less objection. Finally, I decided I needed to see what it looked like from inside her mouth. She really fought that! We finally got her mouth open enough and she lifted her tongue a little and I saw a bright green sphere under her tongue.... A pea

Well at least they all went in their house tonight on their own.

 

[Amykins]

UGh, don't even talk to me about vet scares...poor Wobbles has been to my clinic about ten times in the 6 weeks she's been around! If there's one thing ducks are very, very good at, it's getting into things they shouldn't be. Sigh. I hope Tevye's okay, he's one of my favorite ducks on BYC! <3

 

[Tevyes Dad]

@Amykins Thank you. He should be fine. We'll check him every day and ointment his toe to stave off any infection. I also admit Wobbles is one of the ducks I look out for on the forum. I "met" her in that heart breaking post with Wibbles. And since have had a look out for any more of her cute call duck photos

 

[Amykins]

Aww, thank you so much, hun! Ducks: Bringing people together, more than ever.