Quack, Quack

I have eight more mouths to feed and eight more babies to tuck in each night!  The excitement of it all is great for all of us.  My kids are soo thrilled with the new attraction in our backyard.  Without further a due, here they are:

And here is the story:  Last weekend, the girls found a new hatchling of baby ducks at the ponds around the soccer field.  We spend time at the soccer park four days a week.  They were so excited to go back and check on them during the coming week during soccer practices.  After checking on them a couple more times, on Thursday afternoon, we were shocked to find a dead adult duck (the mommy, we presume) next to one of baby ducks.  We were all so sad and concerned for the remaining ducklings.  The kids all begged Daddy to let them bring them home to our backyard pond!  We all decided that if they were still there on the weekend, we'd consider ideas of how to protect them.  So, Saturday morning we woke up early to get Sloan to her soccer game only find that all the games had been rescheduled for the afternoon (I hadn't checked for an email update that morning) so the field was empty and we found ourselves with some "free-time!"  Of course we all ran to find the baby ducks and sure enough, we found them all huddled together but noticed that some of the big ducks were pecking at them a bit.

After about 30 minutes of watching them, we had put a plan together and decided to bring them home.  They were so little that it wasn't too hard to catch them one by one and place them on the nearby picnic table where they wouldn't jump off and run away from us.  Travis, Ethan and Camryn were the catchers and Sloan, myself and Isaac were the table guards.  When they started getting fast and harder to catch, Camryn rose to the occasion and was determined to get them all gathered up!  We were all impressed with her newly found duck catching skills.

I happened to have my favorite beach bag in the car so we carefully placed them all in the bag, got in the car, and proudly brought them home.  We had about an hour to throw together a fenced in area with a bucket of water  and some food scraps before taking off for the actual soccer game that originally got us out in the first place.

Presently we have a chicken-wire fenced in area for them to swim in the edge of our big pond and nestle in the long grass and clover area of the beach.  They seem very happy.  And my kids are thrilled.  We've done some research on them and have learned that they are rouen ducks, about 2 weeks old.  What an adventure for us and for them!