Picking up our chicks last spring, I got an 11th hour text from Nate asking if I would grab two ducks too. I'm not a long term, commitment making, spontaneous person, but on that day, for whatever reason, I grabbed two ducks as well.
And let me tell you what… If you haven't experienced a baby duck first hand, they are the cutes, little bits of sweetness you will ever be so lucky to lay your eyes on.
There cuteness doesn't last forever. In fact, baby ducks turn into big ducks… as our luck would have it, in this case one male duck, one female duck.
I'm going to skip through the details and jump right over to the part where our female duck started to lay eggs…. in the beginning of fall…. when in Norther Maine it starts getting cold… signs of winter's approach are being noted… and in my opinion a piss poor egg laying time.
I feed our ducks, clean the poop of our ducks, fill a kid's plastic swimming pool, as a make shift pond, for our ducks, stand for arm cramping periods of time with the hose spraying just so for them to blissfully play in the water's spray….. I love our ducks… the ducks do not love me… and now they had eggs in an area, I tend to daily.
Did you know ducks can hiss? Did you know they have it in their nature to crouch real low, spread their feathers out real wide, making them look twice their size, and are rather swift when it comes to darting in an attack for your face?
Last Thursday, I was voicing my concern about these unhatched baby eggs to a friend. The typical 22 day hatch period had long passed, the coop needed to be winterized, and these eggs very well could be just that, eggs. Friday night, these eggs hatched into six beautiful little bits of sweetness.
The kids were as excited as Christmas morning and I accepted the trust of Mother Nature to take care of ducklings born on the wrong end of the season…. Well I'm here to tell you that Mother Nature's way of taking care of things sucked and caused my boy to cry and experience one of reality's heart breaks. We were 2 ducks down with the other 4 not far behind in their fate.
This Mother did not approve and took over. I now have four ducklings in our house, two Sam hating parents outside, and a husband insulating these babies, someday, new home as I type.
We may not have a pond or even live near water, but we have ducks…. six of them… and we're all smitten.
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