Chickens and ducks. You know the drill.

A new toy for the chickens: a mealworm treat roller, a container that dispenses mealworms as they peck at it, to keep them entertained for a while:

Ducks on the pond deck:

Ducks flapping wings:

Betty:

Merida:

Chickens with the treat roller again:

Ducks amongst the flowerbeds:

Look closely, and you can see more ducks next to the gazebo:

Here are the other ones:

The two groups joining up:

Ducks zooming over the pond to get treats:

Martha is being broody again:

My blog is having issues with uploading images via WordPress at present, so I uploaded these via FTP instead. Shouldn’t make any difference, just a bit more work. Every time I have issues with WordPress, I’m a little more tempted to write my own blog engine. How hard could it be? (Famous last words.)

Let’s start with some sad news: after not losing any ducks for months, we seem to have lost one: we haven’t seen Cora for a few days. I haven’t seen a body either, or any sign of an attack, so it’s a bit of a mystery. I did look around to see if she’s nesting, but didn’t see any sign, and would have expected to see her occasionally. So I assume something grabbed her.

That leaves us with six females and five males. That ratio is getting worse.

Anyway, on with the pictures. Here’s the floating island with some ducks and eggs:

Ducks on the bank:

Ducks on the grass, with Rory on our evening rounds. She doesn’t go after the ducks; here, she is more interested in sniffing the deer poop than even looking at them:

Peeking at some ducks in their house:

On the pond:

Bert on the ramp into the duck house:

Duck butt:

The ducks on the lawn near the chicken runs, with some chickens visible:

The two chicken coops:

Some chickens inside the new coop:

The ducks are venturing a bit further afield; here they are in the grove of trees behind the brown gazebo, and looping around it:

This week was an exciting milestone: the ducks started laying eggs.

Firstly, a random picture of the chicken and duck feed:

Some ducks relaxing on the floating pond island:

And near the edge of the pond:

Several ducks coming to under the pond deck to get their mealworm treats, while a couple hang out on the island:

Bert and Rémy on the island:

A couple of latecomers zooming over from the far side of the pond:

Ducks on the back lawn:

They continued over the lawn to the old chicken coop, so I got some pictures with both chickens and ducks:

Heading back over the lawn to the pond:

A cam shot with Bert spreading his wings on the island, and my first glimpse of eggs; more on that later:

A bunch of pictures of the chickens:

The ducks on the pond:

Four eggs on the island:

I was hoping they would lay eggs on the island, as a safer place from predators like raccoons.

These probably aren’t fertilized, but now that at least one of the them is laying, we may get baby ducklings before long:

A bit of snow on the island:

The chickens are continuing to ramp up production, increasing the number of eggs laid each day: