Stories from the Farm

The idiom definition is that if someone has a natural talent for something and enjoys it, they take to it like a duck to water.

After watching our 2 day old ducklings jump in the bowl of water and start bobbing and swimming, I completely understand where this saying comes from.

These are the babies that we have raised, so it isn’t like they have watched their mom swim.  As soon as I set the bowl down they ran over and jumped in. 

You may have noticed that there are a few more ducklings in these pictures – that is because the second mama that hatched 11 babies turned out to be a somewhat negligent mother.  She would keep her babies warm as long as they were under her, but she wasn’t going to go look for them.  Unfortunately, we lost one of the babies the second night, so we have lots of babies in the brooder now.

Which means we had to make some adjustments – first item, bigger brooder.  Thanks to my husband that was a fairly easy task. 

Second item – come up with a way to keep the brooder dry!!!  Ducks LOVE water 🙂  They go through the quart of water within an hour.  They don’t drink all of it, they sit there and dabble in it and play in it.  Unfortunately, that means there is a lot of water everywhere.  We had this tray out in the barn, I’m not sure what it is really meant for – but it works awesome.  I have to dump it out once a day, but the rest of the pen is staying clean and DRY!!!

Since she asked – here are some pictures especially for Lora 😉

He loves his babies!

Going back to the title of this post – I have also discovered that my son has taken to felting like a duck to water.

He loves playing with the soapy water.

He helped with one of my classes a couple weeks ago and everybody got a kick out of him!

Here is the scarf that he was working on in the pictures above.  He did 95% of it by himself and did a great job! 

and this is the snake he made.  A very fun project for kids and adults 🙂