Marmaduke and her ducklings

Marmaduke ( a corruption of Mama Duck) has lived up to her name and hatched 7 exceedingly cute and adventuresome ducklings. These tiny ducklings were hatched three days ago and already, they think they own the place. Despite the fact that they’re provided with their own special baby food, they eat the chicken feed and snap at the hens’ ankles and combs if they try to have a normal meal! Jeez. One of the tinies even terrorized its Papa when he tried to hang with Mama. Nothing funnier than watching a tiny, fluffy yellow duckling chasing down a giant Muscovy drake.

This time we will not offer naming rights to the niece and nephew; the last time we did that the results were a little unimaginative; Jaws, Swimmy, Big Boy,etc…you get the idea. Once a pecking order is established they seem to name themselves, Swimmy turned out to be very timid, thus Timmy, Jaws, as it turns out, was appropriately named as she snaps at the other birds and eats anything that crosses her path, fish, frogs, toads….Big Boy’s name was changed to The Senator, on account of his resemblance to Christopher Dodd and the other male muscovy just looks and acts like a Felix. (I wonder why people don’t use that name more often when naming their children. It’s a good name for someone who’s very cute.)
Meanwhile, Jawsy-wawsy, Timmy-swimmy, and LaLa (the miniature call duck) are all sitting on eggs and we failed to record their due date, mainly because we couldn’t pinpoint a start date. They seemed to lack the necessary commitment at the outset, hemming and hawing, sitting then swimming. We thought we’d outsmarted them by placing some of their eggs beneath a broody hen but the hen turned out to be equally non-committal. I suppose it takes a while to warm up to the idea. After all, what’s so great about sitting in a box for 21 days (25 for ducks) with only a 5 minute break once a day to eat, drink and groom?