Duckies

Heaps of them, enough to throw in a bath and bathe in them. Not that that's a likely event. Caleb's last duck bath some years back ended in howls of pain when Nibbler thought she spied a fat worm.

Our two females bought out eight ducklings each. We thought we might have had a rare double yolker twin set, but eventually the duckling managed to get its legs out of the egg and struggle around like Mr Bean with a Christmas turkey on his head. I helped it out, and it was just one same size duckling as the rest, just in a big bloody egg.

The first duck, Squeaker, quickly knocked her duckling numbers back to three by running around so much they dropped dead of exhaustion.

Duck breeding lesson number one. confine duck and ducklings in a 'duck house' for the first week or two till they've developed stamina to keep up.

We have 19 ducklings. Before they went on the duck cluck we had much discussion about the amount of poop on the door step and reducing duck numbers to nil by a process of trialing peking duck recipes and then... numbers kind of got away on us.

Caleb, who's not adverse to eating an animal after it's stopped being cute is looking forward to this event. Trev and I, older and less inclined to kill anything but slugs, (which the ducks were bought in to do and failed spectacularly at), look at each other sideways and wince.