It's raining cats and dogs.......and ducks

The rain abated overnight on Thursday. We awoke in the early hours of Friday to an amazing cacophony of quacking. One of the ducks sounded in some distress. "Crikey" I thought, "Polly (who is the last of the ducks still sitting on a nest) has flown out of her nest in the barn through one of the horses' windows and can't get back in again". I sprang out of bed, sped down the steps and - donning wellies - dashed down to the yard. Where I found Polly still quacking for all she was worth outside one of the barn doors. I quickly opened two or three doors for her and, as I'd suspected, she speedily waddled back towards her nest. So I left her to it and returned to bed and my pot of tea!

It's THE BIG WEEKEND for the piggies - showtime - so the main job of the morning, when we surfaced again, was to move Dolly and her brood from the stalls nursery to the main Poultry Palace pen so that Wurzel and Pepper could later be transferred to the stalls from their quarters in order to begin the preparing-piggies-for-show process. It's no easy task to move 7 ducklings and their mother; first they have to be safely cornered and then gently scooped up one by one and placed in a large box- with mum attacking the marauding hands with her beak for all she's worth. However, I've had a bit of practice by now, and luckily managed to do this pretty quickly, successfully transferring the family to the New Pond. Dolly spent a bit of time showing the little ones the perimeters of the pen but very soon they were all happily ducking and diving on the pond.

Having let the other Poultry Palace residents 'out' for the day I returned to the barn to check that Polly had found her way back to her nest. But when I looked, there was no bird. Just a few broken eggs. My first thought was that Polly had, like Dolly, managed to get her brood off the hay stack and out into the world when no-one was looking. But I was puzzled by that because, in order to keep them all safe from the dogs, I had put a broody pen around the bottom of the hay. So I looked around on the floor of the pen and, sure enough, tucked in the hay, by the water container was a little cluster of yellow and brown fluff! Not so little either. Nine tiny ducklings all huddled together to keep warm - on their own - no sign of Polly..... So I went out to the Poultry Palace pen and did a beak count and sure enough, there she was, with all her mates having a jolly good old gossip. Thinking she'd return to her brood later I left her to it.

But did she return? Did she heck. Later in the day it dawned on me that all that early morning quacking was, in fact, Polly trying her hardest to encourage her brood to follow her out of the barn and down to the pond. But the poor little things - with no wings and not enough strength to jump over the pen, or even push under or through - couldn't possibly follow. So I reckon after an hour or so of trying she, and they, gave up. And now they're little orphans. I alternately switched the lights on and off during the remainder of the day to encourage them to eat - in the light - and sleep - in the dark and put a hot water bottle covered in hessian under a patch of their hay bedding for the night. Let's hope the little things survive the next couple of days. If they do we'll move them to the stalls (when the piggies are gone) for the first month, after which they'll be strong enough to join the others. If they all survive, of course, we'll have rather a lot of ducks..... but that's a 'problem' for another day....

What a life!