here ducky ducky ducky | Chickens in the Road

Mar
12

With the release of The Pacifier movie, fellow writer and duck lover Larissa is jonesin’ for some duck photos. I live to serve.

I have an entire website devoted to ducks, but the link is currently buried at the bottom of my Extras page, so here it is. This is an old homemade website I created a few years ago on AOL using Easy Designer (so stop laughing!) and it hasn’t been updated lately because I can’t get Easy Designer to work for me anymore. (I HAVE NO IDEA WHY. Just suddenly one day, poof, it stopped working. And some of the links on the page may now be broken.) I have a new website planned and a domain name bought–Pink Pony Diaries. I even have the lovely and talented Alison Kent of DreamForgeMedia lined up to design it. If I would STOP adding things to my author site, maybe some day I can actually get it off the ground!

I love ducks. We lived on a huge lake in Texas for 12 years. You can read the story of how Pink Pony came into our lives, along with peeks into her love life, her health and grooming guide, dating tips, recipes, and lots of fun duck photos–and babies! I love duck babies! Pink Pony and friends are Muscovies, and if you ever want to get a pet duck, I recommend them. They are the BEST ducks ever. They don’t quack–the girls squeak and the boys hiss–so they’re very quiet ducks. They also have incredible personalities and are very people-oriented. They will eat right out of your hand, let you pick them up, and follow you around.

duckrun (27k image)

Back in Texas, I had about 100 Muscovies and I had them trained. I would start training them at birth to the sound of the clang of a can inside a bucket and they would come to me for food. I would walk around the yard often like the pied piper with dozens of ducks following me in a line. They have very complicated social orders and it’s fascinating to watch them interact with one another. The downside of Muscovies is the poop. Since they like you so much, they’ll come right up to your porch and poop for you outside your back door. :hehe: But they are so much fun, I never really minded. There’s nothing like holding a pecking egg in your hand and watching a new baby crack out of its shell before your eyes.

pinkponybabies (25k image)

Our children always named the ducks (Pink Pony was named by my daughter when she was five–she loves Pink! she loves horses too–so, Pink Pony!). A lot of them were named after Pokemon characters. One of our most hilarious ducks was Haunter aka the Devil Duck. He could also be scary! He was very aggressive (and quickly worked his way to the top of the duck social chain). But when he couldn’t get a girl, he was so oriented to humans that he would come after us in a mating attack. When male Muscovies mate, they launch onto the females back and begin pecking their necks (which is why in the spring, many female Muscovies have open, bloodied sores on the backs of their necks). For awhile, every time my daughter went outside, he would attack her. He would attack me as well. Now, these are heavy ducks–a full-grown Muscovy male might weigh 15 pounds and they’re quite large with very strong wings. One time, I was so annoyed with him, I managed to pick him up (picking up a duck is a feat in and of itself and there’s a trick to it that I learned over time involving exactly how you position your hands over their back and wings in order to immobilize them) and I carried him off to the dock and dumped him in the water. I started walking back up to the house and I heard an ominous splashing and realized he was launching himself out of the water. I looked around and just had enough time to scream and start running. He flew straight after me all the way to the house. I thought I was in that movie The Birds . I barely escaped into the house in time.

When we moved to North Carolina, we brought Pink Pony with us. Okay, I flew on an airplane, actually, with our daughter. :hehe: MY HUSBAND drove cross-country with our two sons, a hamster, the two dogs, and Pink Pony. They stopped one night in a hotel and he put Pink Pony in the bathtub. (We left the other ducks behind under the care of a neighbor. For some reason, my husband didn’t want to take 100 ducks to North Carolina.) After we got here, I got some new ducks from a local farm, some Muscovies, but mostly some Pekins. We also live on a lake here, but there is a larger one that Pink Pony prefers, so I don’t see her as much anymore, but she’s still going strong and enticing all the males in her vicinity into her seductive web.