Sometimes, life does just go as planned.

Supposedly, when a Muscovy duck is going to hatch out some ducklings, she will lay all of her eggs first, and then begin to incubate them. This is not the way that our duck chose to do it though.

She laid a few and began to sit on them, and then kept laying. At first, two ducklings hatched out. A few days later, another one did. Then, the day after that, another one. She still has seven eggs under her now.

We are not sure why, but both of the newer ducklings ended up with large wounds on their backs. We saw that the mother may have been acting aggressively towards the newer ducklings, so we chose to separate them. Unfortunately, one did not make it.

HANGING OUT WITH THE KEETS

Today, we built an outdoor pen for the keets and decided to let the little Muscovy duckling hang out for a little bit.

Keets are interesting animals and were afraid of it for a while.

Every time they moved away, the little duckling would follow.

Eventually, they became friendlier. On the bright side, at least they were not aggressive towards it.

THE OLDER SIBLINGS

We let the other ducklings (the older siblings) out for a wander too.

We took the chance to let the little one say “hi” for a bit. They were not as afraid as the keets.

We are not sure what will happen with the rest of the eggs, but it looks like we will at least have three ducklings from this mama this time around. Also, her sister, the big black mama duck, is starting to lay too!