My Muscovy Ducks Tale

Play Pen In Action

This is about 3pm in the afternoon. The baby Muscovy ducks get out of the brooder and the garage!

Fresh air and excercise. Yahoo!

My gosh they are adorable. The yellow ducks are Spentie and Angel. I can't tell the other ones apart enough to name them yet. "The Peepers" is working for me so far.

What do you do with 12 ducks, and no mama? You can't just let them run around your yard all day. Cotton Mouths, hawks, raccoons, you name it - not safe. Not to mention - I can't baby sit - I work full time. Plus I have two parents, and 3 cats - one of them sick. EEK!

This is where "The Engineer" comes in.

They need a play-pen so they can be outside during the day. And be safe.

Enter "The Play Pen" ~

One Bummed Dude

As I said, during all of this, I had a sick cat. JB, had crystals in his bladder. After a week at on a catheter, he had to have surgery. He was at the vet's for 2 weeks, spent 2 weeks in solitary and then another week or so with a cone around his neck.

Not a happy baby. :(

Inside The House

Animals outside, animals inside, ain't we got fun???

So while all of this time and energy is being spent on ducks and lizards, the inside babes need attention too. Cat boxes, food and water, the whole shibang!

Meet "The Boyz".

Birds Do It, Bees Do It.....

Even Iggy the Iguana does it....

My back yard is the Playboy Mansion for beasts. o_O !!!

A Change In Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

There is more to life than ducks. (SHOCKING!)

In my post "Ducks! 2009", you were briefly introduced to another back yard dude, Iggy!
Now, the first time I "met" Iggy, he was using my pool as the commode :(

Igg is a 4-5 foot Iguana, that likes to sun himself on the patio. He is a big fan of grapes & bananas. Eats them right out of my hand!

Don't sunbathe and leave your feet down - he will mistake your toe for a grape! Yes, I still have all ten digits. ^_^

Will The Hatching Ever End?

Once it started, it seemed it would never stop. What an amazing event to witness. When I thought it was over, at about 2:00 on Saturday, I set the 6 dormant eggs in another area of the garage. I came out an hour later and heard peeping. Holy cow! More are going to hatch? It started at 1:30pm on July 31, 2009 and the last one (with my help) emerged at 6:00pm on Saturday, August 1, 2009. In the end - out of the 15 eggs, 12 hatched.

Off to Wal-Mart!

Backing up a smidge, when the eggs started peeping and pecking, I ran to Wal-Mart. I had been doing some research on what to do once they hatched. I needed a "chick brooder" to place them in while they dried off, and stabilized.

Wal-Mart has tons of plastic bins so I got the largest one I could find. I got home, placed a towel inside and put it on top of the heating pad. A water bottle substituted for Mama. Baby chicks cannot make their own body heat for sometime, so this was important!