Duck Liquidation

I sold most of our Pekins yesterday. The only ones left are a female with leg problems and an extra male. Duck soup!

We just didn't have time to be dealing with meat ducks with everything else we're doing. They're pretty unforgiving, because if you don't slaughter at seven weeks then you have to wait until after the molt or deal with thousands of pin feathers. Plus, the males were really aggressive to the runner ducks, and had killed several. I'm down to only two runner ducks at this point.

The Pekins went to a small farm up in Jewett. The people that bought them were very nice. I would have liked to spend more time talking with them, but it was getting late and we all had kids that needed to get home to bed.

Brooding

Two of the Australorps have been broody for about two months, but I've been much too busy to mess with them. I finally had a chance to set up nesting cages for them in the basement, in dog crates. Broody hens make a funny trilling sound if you move them, and raise their neck feathers to try to look intimidating. They trilled at me when I started arranging the hay they were sitting on into a nest, but as soon as I started putting eggs into it the angry sounds turned into a satisfied clucking. The hens seemed to be a bit surprised by the unprecedented event of the human putting eggs into the the nest, instead of taking them away. When I was done they used their beaks to rearrange the eggs more to their liking and then settled down, happy at last. I gave each of them a dozen fresh eggs, so hopefully we'll have some chicks by the end of the month.