A delicate little flower

This is a blog about the newest member of our duck flock. Her name is Flower -- because she's a delicate little flower.

As you all know by now, Anna is a veterinarian.  Flower was bought by a family as an Easter present to their kids (that's a topic for another post) and was brought to the clinic where Anna works to be euthanized because she had a twisted neck.  Twisted neck can happen with improper diet, vitamin deficiency, toxicity, or more serious diseases.  When Anna found out about Flower, she knew she had to bring her to our farm.  If she could show us that she's capable of eating and living a normal life, there's no reason for her to be euthanized.

Here's what Flower looked like on day 1 with us.  She's probably about 2 weeks old in this photo. We were hopeful that increasing her vitamins would help her to straighten her neck out -- that and telling her regularly to "put your head on straight!"  She came with that teddy, and after we put it on the ground, she snuggled it nightly….adorable.

After a few days of having Flower at our house, Anna got some bad news.  When the previous owners got her, her neck was already like this.  She was only a couple days old at that point, and all the other ducklings with her were fine.  This made us pretty nervous that increasing her vitamins and bettering her diet wouldn't be enough.  We started preparing ourselves for having a very special needs duck, and if she proved to be unable to live a happy, healthy life, we were preparing ourselves for the tough decision to go ahead with the euthanasia.

So, we worked out a daily vitamin/greens routine which she enjoyed thoroughly.  Ducklings LOVE fresh greens -- I often feel like there should be some sort of signage a local ponds telling people to stop throwing bread and start throwing salad. We gave her water with some vitamins A, E, and B, and we added nutritional yeast to her food for more vitamin B -- B is a big one for duckling development and the main ingredient that commercial chick starter food (for chickens) is lacking.

Flower taking a break from greens and vitamins….still crooked. :\

Mmmmm….greeeeeeeens!

You can see that her neck is getting a little less crooked, but it still isn't quite right, and she still has some pretty severe episodes.  We started taking her outside with us if we were working in the garden or somewhere where she'd be protected from the dogs and we could keep an eye on her.  Outside, she was really good.  Her neck was pretty normal most of the time…unless she got stressed out. If we walked too far away from her, she would get really stressed, start freaking out, get twisted upside down, start stumbling backwards…it wasn't good.

Here's a video of Flower doing well in the garden with Anna in her early days.  You can see that her head is looking better but is definitely a little crooked still.

Filmed that same day -- one of her not so good moments. Anna stopped filming once she really started freaking out, but you get the idea.

At this point, she'd been with us for about a week and a half, and we were beginning to wonder if she was going to get better.  She was showing improvement, but she still wasn't as good as we would have liked.  Within a few days, however, she started getting better and better, and her episodes of upside-downness were getting fewer and fewer.  Given that she's a duck, we knew that if she was going to be fully integrated with our flock, she would need to be able to swim.  We decided to put her in the bath tub to check out her swimming abilities.  It wasn't pretty the first few times.  She freaked out, turned her head upside down and swam in backwards circles.  Upside down head in the water = no breathing.  Not good.  We really wanted to see if she could swim, so we kept at it.  We'd put her in the tub with enough water for her to stand so she didn't have to swim if she didn't want to.  Eventually, she got more and more comfortable in the water, and one day she just did it!  She started swimming happy laps around the tub splashing, bathing, and being a generally happy duck.

Since then, she's just gotten better and better.  I don't remember the last time she had an upside down neck moment.

Eventually, she got too big and the splashing got to be too much for the counter, so vitamin time got moved to the sink.  Her neck is MUCH better here!

Napping with the farm manager while we were doing some planting.

She's now been with us about 3 weeks, and we've been starting to give her a lot of unsupervised outside time.  We have a poultry seclusion pen -- we use it for new birds, sick birds, etc.  She's been spending almost every day that the weather's nice out there -- she doesn't quite have enough big girl feathers to spend rainy days outside yet.  Downy feathers + rain = waterlogged, chilly, unhappy duckling.  We've also been giving her supervised time with the entire flock -- adult ducks and teenager chickens.  They're definitely interested in her, but they haven't been too overly aggressive.  At first, she was pretty wary of going in the pond with the big girls, but she found a somewhat secluded corner of the pond and started swimming and dabbling at the greens we tossed in.  Within a few days, she took the big plunge into the middle of the pond and started swimming with her new friends.

Today, she's having her first unsupervised time with the flock -- though, admittedly, we keep looking out the window at her.  Some of the chickens are paying her a bit more attention than we'd like, but she's holding her own.  Naturally, we had to photo/video document the occasion.

Looking good!  Strutting her stuff in the yard.

Checking out the camera. Yep, it's adorable.

Look at that happy duckling.  Give her a few more weeks (and some more feathers!), and she's going to be with the full flock all the time.

Oh, I forgot to mention one more ridiculously adorable thing that happened as we were raising her. Any time she was out and about with us...

Yeah, that never gets old.  We're really looking forward to watching her grow into an adult duck.  Based on her voice, it appears that she is, indeed, a female.  We think she's a Pekin duck, so we'll have another decent layer in our flock.

We're really glad we adopted her, and we're even more glad she recovered so quickly and easily.  All she needed was proper nutrition. What a lucky duck! I couldn't help myself.