My Ducks That Bullied Chickens (A Farm Story)

  I have not had the best experiences with ducks. The first duckling I had was given to me for my birthday by my best friend at the time, Ricky. He had found it at an auction and he brought it home for me. It was tiny and so sweet and my chicken, Star, had just hatched some chicks and was happy to adopt it. She was seriously the best chicken for adopting orphans. The duckling was a bit too big to fit under her because of all her other babies so it perched on top of her. She was a bantam and so pretty small. It was so precious to walk in the barn and see this little bantam with a duckling happily peeping away on top of her. I was so in love with this tiny duckling. However tragedy struck only too soon. We had a dog who was always very jealous of any other animal we loved and one day as I was carrying the duckling she jumped up and just nicked it in the chest with her tooth. The poor ducky went into shock and died pretty quickly. I was heart broken and my siblings and neighbors and I had a funeral for it in my flower garden by the creek.
  For my next birthday my friend Amanda gave me two ducklings in memory of the other duckling I had lost. I named them Zoe and Bryn. They started out innocent and sweet. They would swim in our baby bath tub and walk around with their little tails wagging side to side and they were just the cutest things. However when they got older the story changed drastically. These two ducks became massive bullies. They were big white ducks that looked hefty and they liked to throw their weight around in our chicken yard. They had free rein of our property and the creek but often they would be around the chicken yard and they attacked the chickens. I don't know what it was with them but they had a vendetta. One morning I came outside there they were but they were attacking a chick. That was it. I was so angry I gave them away to our neighbor that very day and they continued on there but there were other ducks and they had to learn to toe the line.
  However, there I was with this baby chicken and its leg was broken. It seemed to have not sustained any other trauma that I could ascertain and by then I was pretty schooled in barnyard fowl injuries. I was a child who dreamed of being a veterinarian and so any excuse I had to doctor an animal was taken very seriously. I got a crate and carried it up to my bedroom. In the crate I put hay and sawdust and a little bowl of water and food. I knew the chick would be warm and safe up there. Then I had to think of a way to splint that tiny leg. I got a pencil and split it in half (I think my dad helped me come up with this idea) and took out the lead. After that I wrapped the tiny leg in a bit of cotton batten and then splinted it with the pencil halves and wrapped tape around it. The little chicken lived up in my room for a couple weeks. The leg ended up healing perfectly and when I let it go back in the chicken yard it grew into a fine rooster none the worse for its near death experience with Zoe and Bryn. I never got any other ducks. When we lived on our farm a couple years ago I rescued what I thought was a duckling from an eagle. It was so tiny and I think the eagle caused brain damage because it was so traumatized it eventually just fell over from exhaustion and died. I think if I move to a farm I wont be getting ducks ~ chickens though...that is a whole different story! Look for chicken stories in my next posts.