With our oldest ‘mama’ goat expecting kids again in the next few days, my mind is drawn to motherhood on the farm, so I thought I would share one of our recent “mothering” adventures.
Those of you who have read my prior stories know fostering chicks with a broody hen is a useful alternative to man-made brooders when raising chickens. With a few hitches along the way, this strategy has allowed me to raise chicks with no heat lamp, and minimal work. You also know that last year I started thinking about adding ducks to my flock, but put the plan on hold with the surge in bird flu. This spring I decided to move forward with ducks, and put in my order with Murray McMurray Hatchery. When one of our hens went broody about 2 weeks prior to the arrival of day-old ducklings, I remembered that my “How to Raise Ducks” book mentioned that ducks could be successfully fostered with broody hens (although the hens tend to get a little frazzled when their “chicks” start jumping into the water). A search on the internet yielded many cute videos of hens raising duckling along with their chicks. So, I figured, why not give it a try? I kept my broody hen sitting on ceramic eggs, awaiting the arrival of the ducklings. She cooperated by staying broody.
When the ducklings arrived, I closed all the other hens out of the chicken house and slipped the ducklings under the hen in the nest box. She immediately settled down on the babies, clucking contentedly. Prior experience told me that once the hen had committed herself to caring for the new arrivals, I would want to move them all out of the nest box to the floor, so that the babies could not be separated from the hen by jumping or falling out of the box. Making sure they are in a place where the hen can keep all the babies together is important to allow her to protect them from the other hens. I left the mama chicken and young ducks secluded in the coop for about an hour to get settled. When I came back, I found ducklings running excitedly around on the floor, while the hen clucked anxiously from the nest box with a few ducklings still in her care. This was not a huge surprise, as it has happened previously with chicks. I knew just what to do. I gathered the hen and all the ducklings and tried to settle them in the space under the nest box, the preferred safe location for all my prior broody hens. The hen settled right in and started calling to the babies. I again left them for a bit, so as not to scare the ducklings away from the hen. However, what the duck book had failed to tell me was that, unlike chicks, who stay faithfully near their ‘mother’ (in fact, mostly underneath her for the first few days in the coop), baby ducks are much more independent minded. When I returned to the coop an hour later, I found all ten ducklings running around on the floor, completely ignoring the hen’s increasingly anxious calls to come to her. On top of that, I now had a crowd of frustrated hens lined up outside the coop, impatient to get in to lay their eggs. Given the situation, I had to admit that I could not imagine how the hen was going to keep the uncooperative ducklings safe in the coop. Sadly, I decided the safest thing was to abandon the attempt at fostering the ducklings with a hen. Fortunately, I had made a backup plan, and I was able to quickly get organized to move the ducks into the “duck house” with a heat lamp and large tub set up as a brooder.
The ducklings settled without difficulty, and it has been fun watching them grow up. They grow amazingly fast, like chicks on fast forward! They are 8 weeks old now, and as big or bigger than the hen I had hoped to foster them with!
So far, the only pond they know is the water pan/kiddie pool in their yard, but boy, do they love to play in the water. Soon, we will be moving them next door to take advantage of the neighbor’s pond, which unlike ours, doesn’t dry up in the summer. I am sure that they will love it, but it will be a bit of a transition for them. They have already been introduced to the house they will live in, and now faithfully go in to sleep at night. This is a major accomplishment on their part, as unlike chickens, who come home to roost, ducks are not known to be faithful about coming in at dusk. But, thankfully, ours have learned to do so (probably not in small part thanks to the incident with the raccoons, a story for another day). When their house is moved over to the pond they will have a new enclosure. The plan is that they will stay in the enclosure in the morning, to lay their eggs, and then free range to the pond in the afternoon. But they need to be comfortable and confident that the new place is “home” before we let them out to explore in the afternoons. And since it took them three days plus bribes of dried mealworms to go anywhere near the kiddie pool I got them as an upgrade from the old goat watering pan they were initially splashing in, I am expecting that the adjustments will take a bit of time. But they will get there, and I can’t wait to see their reaction when they finally realize they can swim!
And just in case you are wondering what the hen thought of the whole business… after a stressful day trying to corral baby ducks, she went back to sitting broody. After another week, I took pity on her and brought her two chicks from Tractor Supply. As I had expected, she was a great mother, and just this week she let the chicks start looking after themselves. Compared to the ducklings, they are still tiny, but they hang together and seem to be managing just fine.
