Year Recap Part 3

Over the summer, we hatched some ducklings!

I don't think I mentioned my ducks before, so allow me to preface with the history of my duckies.

First, there was Dodger. We got him from a farm animal shelter, where we were told he was a girl. He was not. So then, because more males than females leads to fighting, we went searching for a female. And couldn't find any. So we got a chicken to keep him company. We later named her Heihei.

We started noticing a lot of hawks in the area, so to be safe, we got two geese to protect Dodger and Heihei. Their names are Charles (the big white one) and Matilda (the brown speckled one), though we originally had mixed up their genders...

After a couple visits and calls to Lollypop Farm, we eventually became foster parents of a set of white pekin ducks, 2 or 3 of which were females. But they seemed to think they were geese and wouldn't interact with Dodger and Heihei except to bully them. Except one, who finally accepted him. We named her Carla and took the others to Lollypop.

Then, we got two ducklings from a guy on craigslist. They were tiny and adorable, and were eventually named Floppy (the male) and Doofus (the female). Floppy was named for his weak legs as a duckling, which on a few occasions caused him to adorably flop down, and Doofus was named for her... intelligence.

One day in the fall, a hawk flew over and picked off Heihei, who was the sort of loner of the pen. And in the winter a fox attacked, and Dodger (the smallest but the bravest) was taken... After awhile, Carla hurt her foot, and then got sick. Leaving us with just Floppy and Doofus.

So, in the summer, we hatched some of Doofus' eggs. The first two were a male (still unnamed) and a light-colored female, Chestnut.

Then we hatched 3 more, who all were males- Oreo (because of his black and white splotched body when he grew up),

Kakashi (the albino, for his likeness to the Naruto character),

and Haku (who has a malformed wing, but was named after the Naruto character because we originally thought him to be a female because of his loud quacking). I forgot to take a picture of him alone when he was tiny, but he's the one at the top here:

We eventually had to get rid of Floppy, though, because he was too aggressive toward his sons...