They are doing great. I need to get some good close photos of them, the variation in their coloring is mild but makes such a difference in their faces.
We lost one last week. I wasn’t sure if she was sick or injured, but she was in real respiratory distress and spent almost a week living in the bathtub. Thanks to my sister I gave her a couple of days of antibiotics but when nothing changed and she was clearly suffering, we put her down.
I opened her up to see what happened. I was worried whatever caused her breathing problem could spread to the other ducks. I think she had some sort of trauma-maybe ate a piece of metal, as they do. Metal and glass things work up out of the ground here constantly. She had multiple blood clots blocking her trachea, and the clots were all more than an inch long.
I’m so glad we put her down. She would have suffered with that horrible respiratory distress until she slowly starved to death. Poor thing. Thankfully, everyone else seems fine and still dumb and silly and like a school of feathered fish.
The ducklings do huddle but they were also nervous because they were just taken out of the place they’ve been since they hatched and transported by a horrible monster (me) to a new horrible home (Farmlandia) with horrible noises like JT (and Chuckie).
You can judge whether ducklings and chicks are warm enough by their spacing! If they stay in a super tight huddle when they aren’t scared (like you’re hiding and they don’t know you’re looking) they are too cool, if they are spread way out and panty they are hot, if they are just milling around duckily, they are just ducky.
Trelvix’s namesake lives on.
I feel so wistful when I talk to him now. The human Trelvix said it was an honor to have a rooster named after him.
He had such a way of making people feel like they mattered. He liked my stories, and I loved his whimsy.
That’s why I named my first rooster after him. The handsomeness was a bonus.
The appleyards are hard to get, and the only way I could get them was a minimum order of ten, straight run which means unsexed. I still was on a waiting list for nearly a year.
The appleyards are starting to look like boys and girls. I think we have three or four drakes.
