Speug

Our guinea pig's guests from last night were about more birdlike business today. Namely emptying our birdfeeder at top speed.

Garden's full of baby birds. Sparrows, blackbirds, starlings and our duck is sitting on eggs. So hopefully they'll be a few ducklings in the next few weeks.

We had a rough time over the winter where we lost most of our ducks. They are very prone to viral infections and we lost 2 of the original ducks plus 5 out of 6 young ducks within a week. We suspect either from duck meningitis or a chest infection. We never had a chance to get any of them to the vet as they looked perfectly healthy one day and were dead the next so we don't actually know what happened.

This was pretty harrowing so this year we decided not to hatch any ourselves but are delighted that Trout is sitting on eggs. Fingers crossed. One things for sure, if we do have any ducklings we'll be whisking them off to the vet at the slightest sign of anything amiss.

Interestingly the young duck we have left is Muddle, the one which Hope's daughters named. Early on he had a chest infection and had antibiotics, I wonder if the others had a similar infection which he had built up an immunity to. I have been trying to get a good pic of Muddle recently as has grown into a very dapper black drake but he's too fast for me to get an in focus shot. Meanwhile you get an out of focus pic of a wee fluffy speug instead.



Meanwhile elsewhere in the garden...