Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Foul Fowl...

I wish I had scratch and sniff capabilities for your computer screen. No description of mine will come close to the reality of how foul fowl can smell. I cleaned their pen less than 48 hours ago, while they were bathing in the sink, remember? This is what their clean pen looked like. It smelled good, too, like fresh pine shavings. Now, it is bad enough to have me watching the clock for Sean's arrival with more pine shavings. This is what happens when you mix water with water fowl. The ducks "dabble" which gets the water all over the floor of their pen, mixes with their droppings to create a disgusting, sticky glue, add to this heat and you get the idea of what I am dealing with. The obvious solution, which my friend, Cherie supplied, is to move them outside. She was even kind enough to offer me a pen suitable for them.

So, why wouldn't I? Well, consider this; the ducks and geese get handled extensively each day. At night, they climb up my legs and body to settle onto my shoulder or snuggle under my chin. Because they are used to our voices and movement, they are very, very tame and friendly. Though I would still see them outside and visit often, I strongly suspect that they would be more like the ducks living in the chicken yard, friendly enough, but they have no interest in following us around, unless we have bread or some other treat to bribe them with. So, for the now, they remain inside and I remain occupied with cleaning one more cage each day.

In other news, we have 2 mallards with an eye infection in their left eyes. It started with one of our females having a cloudy eye about a week ago. Merck Veterinary Manual, here I come! The treatment suggested is an opthalmic triple antibiotic ointment. We brought her inside, washed the eye out with clean warm water and applied a triple antibiotic cream to her eye. She remained secluded for a week in a pen in our office while we continued treatments and seems to be recovering. Then, Angelus, our drake with "angel wing" started showing signs of an eye infection, yesterday. So, we began treatment for him, too. They will need to be secluded from the rest of the flock, treated, and the rest of the flock will need a close inspection and watching. It is never boring around here!

Sean just got home and we have some chicken tractors to finish, some veggies to get planted, and I need to tackle this duck pen! Have a great evening, friends! ♥

Sonja

2 comments:

  1. Growing up on a chicken farm I can smell it as you describe. Yuck! On the lighter side we would call it chicken perfume.

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