Full schedule, messy Marvin’s, fatal failure, moving quickly

Since the schedule Mama has adopted of five feeding times per day for the baby goats, her schedule, and by default, our schedules have become full. Starting at 6:30 am and culminating at 9 pm. Trips to doctors, my work schedule this week, and Victoria’s surgery early tomorrow morning all strain the feeding schedule. That’s just this week’s interruptions. But Mama manages to keep everything in perspective while remaining as close to possible the predetermined feeding schedule. Yesterday, Mama bemoaned the fact that the babies only got fed four times, having missed the mid-morning feeding due to a medical appointment for Grandpa. She was also a little bit concerned that, because I have to teach a class tomorrow morning while she takes Victoria in for her surgery, that the morning feeding could lapse into a later hour. Fortunately, Grandma and Grandpa have taken on that responsibility. It is a good thing Mama has so much help. Without that extended help those poor babies might be reduced to only three feedings per day. Heaven forbid!

Late Monday evening, Mama and I cleaned the small enclosure the eight ducklings are being kept in. That enclosure is the box I build into the grow out pen set up specifically for ducklings. Because we have had such cool nights, we have not let the ducklings, four of which are quite small, out of the box and into the little yard built into the grow out pen. That release into the larger area will need to happen soon because the little messy Marvins are ruining the floor of the box they are in. I did not build the box with the idea of it remaining constantly soaked with water, but that is what is happening. They splash the water out of the dish we provide for them necessitating a refill several times per day. They are ducks, after all. That amounts to about three gallons of water being spilled onto the floor of the box daily. We can lift the lid on the box but that does not provide enough ventilation to allow the box to dry out, especially with the humid weather we have had recently. The swelling of boards in that floor is becoming obvious. Hopefully, getting the ducklings and the water dish out into the open ground of the pen will allow the floor of the box to dry out well enough that I do not need to replace it. Unfortunately, the yard inside the enclosure is small by comparison to the main duck enclosure, so I expect that will quickly become slimy as the ducklings resort to splashing the contents of their water dish onto that area.

Mama called me yesterday when I was on a break in the class I was presenting to tell me that the alarm on the small, newer incubator was sounding. The temperature in the incubator was showing to be 109 degrees. Far too high for the eggs we are trying to hatch. The only remedy was to have her lift off the lid to allow the interior of the incubator and the eggs inside it to cool back down to the prescribed 99 degree. Unfortunately, removing the top of the incubator stopped the movement of the egg turner built into the incubator. With the extremely high temperature (for an unknown period of time) and the lack of movement of the eggs for several hours, we may have had a fatal failure within the incubator. Time will tell, but even though I reset the temperature and restarted the egg turner required of proper incubation, we may have lost this entire batch of eggs. That would be sad.

Fortunately, we do not necessarily need the additional ducklings, but it would have been nice to hatch our own eggs versus always purchasing hatchlings from others. Our most recent purchase of ducklings cost us $7 per duckling. The same lack of actual need is true for the two dozen chicken eggs we have in the larger incubator. We do not need the chicks, but we certainly could sell the hatchlings easily at Trade Days. So far this year, every batch of chicks received and put out for purchase in all of the feed stores surrounding us have been bought up within hours of the store opening. One clerk Mama talked with told her that there have nearly been fights over who was first in line at the brooders the chicks were in at the store. Since the sales are first-come-first-served, that makes a difference. Several mean spirited buyers purchase every chick left in the brooders when their turn came. Sad. So, if we could hatch out our own chicks, we would have an immediate market. At $5 per chick, two dozen would bring $120. Of course, we cannot count our chickens before they hatch, but we could do our part to sate the market with the chicks we do manage hatch.

In case you have not noticed, today is March 1^st. That may not seem like an important point, but in just thirty one days we will have exhausted one quarter of this year. Wow!