Ducks Adopt Baby Chick

I having coffee on my screen porch and watching the ducks and chickens do their thing in the yard.  Each morning when I open the hatch door to let the chickens out to play in the yard for the day, the ducks line up close by the watch for the little tiny chick to peep his way down the hatch door.

The mother hen and her chick usually stay close to the chicken house while she trains and teaches the chick how to scratch the dirt and find food.

The ducks seem to love to watch the hen and chick and will lay down in the straw for a few hours just to enjoy the scene.

Peek a Boo

 

Rooster Dives at Duck

This morning unlike any morning before this, our main rooster, Rocky, apparently got fed up with Daffy Duck, our largest Cayuga duck.

The five ducks are extremely territorial and their territory keeps expanding.  Rocky and his gang of eleven Bantams stroll up from the chicken house each morning to see what I've thrown out the back door for them.

I buy lettuce especially for them and have plenty of sunflowers seeds so they usually enjoy breakfast.

But today, when Daffy started toward the hens to shoo them off, Rocky jumped high and did a kind of dive bomb on him.  Daffy had a startled look on his face, kind of a "what the h--l" look.  Why don't they do that stuff when I'm holding my camera.

New Baby Chick Born Feb 4

When Gary (my brother in law) entered the chicken house early morning on Feb 4, he heard a tiny little peep peep coming from under the white hen.  We knew she had an egg under her all this time and that there was a good chance the little feller would hatch out soon.

However, the weather was so frigid (10 degrees) and dreary, and we always thought baby chicks were only born during spring and summer and fall but never winter.  We were wrong.

We have twelve chickens now and all our pets, but pets that lay nice healthy eggs.  However, our five ducks give us about a dozen eggs a week and duck eggs are ten times tastier than store bought eggs --