Friday, October 26, 2012

345 The mighty Ducks of Dafodil Dam

My granddaughter Haylee Lahrman has been raising ducks lately in her 4H club projects the last couple years. Last year she kept some ducks long enough to lay eggs and hatch out baby ducks. She kept these 4 ducks till they were about half grown and brought them over to my pond late in the summer. It has been fun watching them grow up and become what I call semi wild ducks. There is three males I have named Hewey, Dewey and Louie and there is a female I call Martha. Actually it was funny but when she first left them here they actually were afraid to get into the water, can you believe it a duck afraid of water? And they did not fly yet either although they could if they wanted to. So one day I saw that they had found the dock that we have going out into the pond. So I thought maybe I would teach them to like the water at least and maybe fly, so I herded them to the end of the dock and shooed them off. They all jumped off and quite scared they were semi flying and kind of running on the water all at the same time. They got to the bank and sat there, kind of recovering. A day later they were close to the dock so I herded them back onto the dock for another lesson. They got shooed off the end again and this time they actually flew about 20 or so feet into the air to the end of the pond. By the third day they were on the dock as I walked by, I guess wanting to make a game of this so I walked them to the end and this time they got even higher into the air.
Well they are full grown now and the three males heads are very dark green. Martha is just a nice brown color and they have all become semi wild. I can not get close to them and they do not walk up to me anymore. I give them shelled corn occasionally but they seem to do well on just eating stuff from the pond. Not sure what maybe moss or algae but they have their heads down in the water a lot looking for stuff. I don't know how they will fair this winter when the pond freezes from time to time...Sometimes for a long time but we will just have to see...My son John brought a little dog house over and it has straw in it but so far they don't really get into it...Maybe they will maybe they will just fly away or to Florida like snow birds do. We will see.