Have you ever heard of a Chicken Duck? Well we have one! Let me explain...
We have a lot of chickens. We also have a couple roosters. Here's a fun fact for you. If you put a rooster in with hens, he'll do what roosters do. If you put a rooster in with 5-10 hens, you can incubate the eggs and hatch them out with a high probability of them being fertilized and producing chicks in 28 days. If you put 2 roosters in with 250 hens, the odds of them all being fertilized is pretty low. Roosters usually pick their favorite hens and only cover their favorites. That means there are a lot of hens that are laying unfertilized eggs.
Ducks, who also lay eggs, tend to make their nests and lay their eggs wherever they'd like around the farm, at least my ducks do. In the cow free stalls, in the middle of a flower bed, under and behind a chicken transport cage laying in the barn....
Now here's why this matters to the story: the odds of one of my chickens laying a fertilized egg is slim. The odds of one of my chickens laying a fertlized egg outside of the chicken building is really slim. The odds of one of my chickens laying a fertlized egg outside of the chicken building and in a duck nest where other fertlized duck eggs are is really, really, really slim! But that's exactly what happened.
One day I noticed that one of our female ducks was "setting." I counted the days on my calendar so I could have a protected area for them with duckling safe waterers and ducking safe food and predator proof pen when the time was right. About 4 days ahead of schedule I noticed a couple of the eggs hatching with little yellow chicks peeking out! Of the 14 eggs in this duck nest, she hatched 2, yes 2 baby chicks and 10 ducklings. (Unfortunately one of the chicks died fairly quickly.) They were quite the sight as they grew. Ducklings grow much quicker than chicks so the chick, aptly named Chuck the chicken duck, had to figure things out earlier than usual.
We tried to decide if it was better to leave the chick with the mama duck or to separate it and put it with the chickens. In the end, we left it with the mama duck and it's adoptive siblings. For several weeks we didn't know if Chuck was a hen or rooster. And once we realized she was a hen, her name was stuck. She ate with the ducks, she scavenged with the ducks, she traveled around the farm and fields with the ducks and she went up at night into their pen with the ducks. She didn't usually get in the kiddie pool with them but she would sit right outside of it waiting for them to get done. She even "talks" differently. She makes a lower, throaty sound rather than the "bwak" of the chickens. As animals are prone to do, the chickens and the ducks all wander far and wide around our farm. Sometimes in the same area at the same time, she completely ignores the other chickens. She will even chase them away from wherever she is scratching around. Maybe we should have gotten her a mirror? Once she started laying, she makes her nests like the ducks do, wherever she wants!
This has been several years ago and many different batches of ducks have come and gone and Chuck is still with us. There is a reason that the saying "a sitting duck" means probably a short life. Ducks do not have a lot of self preservence. Chuck has made it through various predator encounters, harsh winters, and hot summers. With each new batch of ducklings that arrive, she paces outside their pen until they are big enough to handle the outside world. She "talks" to them and squawks at them and then shows them around the place when they are let outside. She has never let us near enough to pick her up or pet her. She really ignores us as much as possible. But she is never far from the ducks. There are many people that know and like to follow the antics of Chuck the Chicken Duck and we hope that you do too! If you visit the picture page, look for the pictures of Chuck ( a large white leghorn) with her brown duck friends:)
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