Lovett's Ducks - Good luck? Bad luck?

Day old chicks come every week now and Lovett cannot get enough. Last year she took to sneaking them home to her bedroom and while she has not gone that far this year she has been asking if we can hatch any of her duck eggs. She even learned that her friend Miranda has an egg incubator.

Racey and I have not been ready to embrace hatching ducklings, but that all changed on Friday.

Lovetts ducks have a bad habit of heading up to the road in the morning. Racey and I will go and shoo them off the road, always muttering under our breath that this is not a good place to causally linger.

Friday morning I drove Lewis and Lovett to the ferry for their daily across the lake to school and as we pulled out of the driveway we could see the ducks on the road. Lovett told them from the back seat to get off the road, it can be dangerous! My own instincts told me that the posture of the two ducks we could see on the road was not normal and I could feel my heart rate increase.

Not wanting to be late to the ferry we turned down the road away from the ducks, leaving them in our rear view mirror. Lovett did not mention the ducks again on our short drive to the ferry, but the image of two ducks in the road and my beating heart stayed with me the whole drive.

Approaching the farm on my way back from dropping them at the ferry there were no longer ducks in the road. Good luck? Bad luck?

I called Racey, jumping right into my explanation of seeing the ducks and something looking off, but maybe i was imagining things. Racey paused and told me how she had heard a truck honk its horn on her way to feed kit cat. She wondered if it was someone we knew?

As she walked up to the road the clues began to add up. She found not one, not two but three dead ducks, all hit while trying to cross the road. The two surviving ducks were sitting in the grass seemingly stunned from the sudden turn of events.

Sadness flooded my body and I sat down in the mudroom and hung of the phone. Bad luck ducks.

Racey and I both went to pickup Lewis and Lovett at the ferry that afternoon, and told Lovett about the dead ducks.

Wait...three ducks are dead? So two are still alive? What about Zippy (the drake) is he still alive?

She was full of questions, mixed with sadness she asked if she could get more ducks? Maybe more ducklings? Then she turned to her friend Miranda who was had come off the ferry and was heading home to her farm down the road. What about her incubator? Could we hatch some eggs?

Good luck?

We drove straight to Miranda's house and she had the incubator ready and waiting for us.

Lovett and I wasted no time, we set the incubator up in our house, cleaned and prepared it for the eggs. We collected eggs, even taking some from the farm store to put as many eggs in as we could. How many would hatch we wondered?

We learned all about incubating eggs, correct temperature and humidity control. We learned they need to be turned and marveled at how the automatic turner slowly turned the eggs.

Lovett made a special map to keep track of which eggs went where, since we learned there are different ways to prepare eggs for incubation. We had the "W" group that was in a refrigerator for a few hours (not ideal) and we washed well with soapy water. 

Saturday morning we decided to move the ducks home to down past the barn near the pigs, so they are much farther from the road. So we loaded them into a small dog crate, gathered up kit cat and took them down to their new home farther from the road.

For those of you who have enjoyed Lovetts duck eggs in the farm store, we are going to reserve eggs for the next week or so for hatching.

As we tucked in for bed I marveled at Lovetts perspective. 3 dead ducks, 20 eggs in an incubator with 28 days to go. Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?

-Nathan