Weasle caused a duck disaster

I discovered the vacant nest day before yesterday. We had noticed that the young mother was hanging around near the mature ducks in the day, unusual.

Most likely a weasel. Or a skunk. They will find a nest and take all of the eggs.

The young hen will begin to lay eggs again and will nest until she has her ducklings.

Last year one of the mature ducks had 6 ducklings hatch, lost all of them and did the whole process over again giving us 9 ducks to mature and winter over.

We don’t want to do that again. Spring is when you can sell the ducklings to folk, and we don’t want more then 5 ducks for the winter. All the ducklings will have to go.

Now we will search out her new nest and check in the mornings for fresh eggs. I like duck eggs, richer and tastier then chicken eggs.

The older ducks don’t seem to be laying and appear to be fine in retirement. I was hoping that the younger duck would join them.

She has found a new place in the sheep barn. Not very safe.

This duck seems to be having better luck.

There are probably 40 eggs in the duck house and most of them now are rotting. This duck keeps moving her nest away from the bad eggs. We have watched her move her operation over a bunch of times.

Yesterday I noticed a couple of eggs out of the nest when she was off and thought that maybe the weasel had struck again here.

But she returned to her nest and it became clear that she has removed eggs that are not good. There is a partial egg that has exploded in front of the nest. The three other eggs could blow at any minute.

The whole duck house reeks of rotten egg. I didn’t think that she had any good eggs left, but was able to move her a bit to see what she was sitting on.

At this point it looks like we might have some ducklings after all.