Monday, May 4, 2009

I am a New Mom, Again!!

Ok so I am not really the new Mom, but I like to think of myself as the surrogate to my precious little 13 new baby.....ducks!
So here is a quick recap, when we moved to this neighborhood 6 1/2 years ago there was a set of Mallard Ducks that would come to our street for mating season each year. The last 2 years they have been in my backyard & we were very diligent about shooing them away but this year they got by us and made their nest in our bushes & laid their eggs. Well I couldn't throw the babies (aka eggs) away much to my hub's dismay so we were getting things together to become duck owners and thought that we had another week of incubation - wrong! This morning my little one who is 21 months came to me and pointed at the back doors and says, "Kack, kack!" I say "Oh yes, are the ducks (meaning the Mom & Dad) in the pool again?" he now really points at the door & says "KACK, KACK!" Hmmmm. Well low and behold he was right 15 ducks in the pool! First let me say oh yes they are cute and how neat to have ducks in your backyard - WRONG! They poo all the time just look at the pics of my pool & that color is so much better than what it has been since they landed in our pool. They have done some serious damage to our yard, we couldn't mow because it upset Mama and I have been there 2 times so I told the hub to leave it be until they babies get here. So now they are here and we can get rid of them and start working on getting our yard ready for summer - WRONG AGAIN! They are a protected duck and no service will come and get them, to sum it up they are ours to figure out what to do with. Great! Just what I needed one more thing to take care of. So what is a girl to do??? I run next door and enlist the help of my neighbors of course and have them chase these ducks around for 3 hours with me! Actually it was fun and we laughed a lot - thanks guys! So we scooped them up out of the pool and got them in a crate and then my hub comes in the yard thinking that we are nuts (he is sooo loving me today) and gets busy building a ghetto duck house in 30 minutes. He says that it will just have to do and their Mother can take care of them until he gets home tonight to see what else we can do. He hurt his back yesterday moving all 150+ packs of waters (see here, here, here, here & here) around so this should be a fun night! Here are some pics of my babies:

Any suggestions or comments are welcome!

3 comments:

  1. If you live in the DFW area, you can drop them off at our house. We have a large pond, and would love some (more) ducks on it

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  2. Thanks for the offer Jessica but we have a shortage of ducks at our 4 neighborhood ponds (turtles & fish are eating the baby ducks) and I would really like to take them down to our pond once they are big enough to survive on their own and help build our duck population. If taking care of them becomes too much I will let you know.

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  3. Duck poo is a great fertilizer for your lawn. My Granny had ducks in her backyard and had the thickest, lushest grass ever.

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