You can also try to cook some vitamin-rice, remember the calcium-rice recipe, just switch the Calcium-Glucconate against your vitamin cocktail…
The ducks will eat all of the rice, but they won't drink all the water…
Just make sure that Junior eats enough of the rice.
I am a bit concerned about Junior from your decision: I have lost a six weeks old duck(ling) who just ate and drank less and less and finally died in a colder night (12° in August here). There is a condition called »failure to thrive« which requires additional attention and motivation give to the affected duck. Additional encouragement to eat and drink.
Btw, dry cat-food is a good supply of protein for "starving" ducks. - And it is not as expensive as other treats.
Yes, we're worried whether on balance she's making progress or not.
She will run, even quite quickly, to stay with the flock wherever they go. Or at least run until the batteries run out, then take a few slow steps and plop down.
The trouble is, once she has stopped and the flock is around her or nearby, she just won't do much. She doesn't do all the duck behaviors when the others do - bathing, foraging, drilling holes, drinking and eating - you know how ducks normally do everything as a group. Not her.
Once in a while will she remember to get up and maybe take some water and peck a little at food; but very tentatively. The only time we can get her to reliably eat at least something is overnight when she's in the crate inside the duck house.
I'm enclosing a photo of dinner that was served for the past night - chicken crumble, corn, barley, cooked peas and vitamin water. She drank half of the water and all of the food except for the crumble of which only half was taken. You can estimate the quantity by looking at the corn and peas.
I read up on niacin stability under heat (I know some of the B's are not happy about that) and it seems OK, so your rice hint looks like it should work fine, we'll try that. It is presumably also resilent to air and sunlight so my "let's put vitamins in every water basin over the day" thing seems OK too.
Junior is not really fully feathered and not really waterproof; there was a rainshower yesterday, she looked very wet and was cleaning herself constantly for hours after. We sometimes just grab her and pour water over her beak or dunk her head so the nares would be OK - since she doesn't seem intent on doing it. I don't even know if we're doing anything good with that.
All the other ducks seem to be in fine shape. The other 2 newcomers have integrated well, we very rarely see them being pecked at by the original ducks anymore and they fully take part in all group activities.
