Last week, readers would have learned that I am getting a crash course in all things rural at our new home and that while chickens were simple, adding ducks to the mix has created a few problems.
Late at night the ducks were tormenting the chickens and plucking out their tail feathers. And I can tell you from first-hand experience, no rooster can puff his chest enough to look proud when he is lacking the plumage that covers his rear.
The prideless rooster was also joined by a six-month long egg strike by his unhappy women.
We eventually built a partition in the coop and added a separate run for the ducks after exhausting other options.
With an equilibrium struck between the warring factions of water and land fowl, a routine set in and in time we found one of our ducks sitting on a brood of a dozen eggs.
Each morning we would go down with the boys to check on the ill-tempered mother.
But nature, by its nature, does not like the routines of little families.
A mistake by myself left a fatal flaw in the redesigned coop and a nearby fox, well-known for eyeing shoddy craftsmanship, took advantage and like the wolf to the little pig’s straw house, found his way in.
My Tuesday’s follow a very regular pattern, deadline day for the newspapers, I get up early and take my coffee out on the deck and survey the land as if I was Friedrich’s wanderer.
Except this morning there was no sea of fog rolling over the foothills of Mount French.
Instead, I was alerted to the grizzly scene below by a procession of crow, trailing to the border of our property.
The eviscerated remains of our ducks were strewn about the orchard like some macabre fertilising regime.
I took off straight for mother duck’s nest to find not a hint of life, not even an eggshell.
I found her several hundred metres away, intact, but neck broken.
The first thing my wife said was that she couldn’t imagine the anger the mother duck must have felt defending her nest.
There was a survivor, bloodied at the neck and dazed and hiding under the coop.
With a hole dug and the gory pieces collected and interred, we started fortifying the defences to make sure no such blunder happened again.
And not a moment too soon, we could hear the assailants the next evening loudly discussing their next meal in the nearby paddock.
