I just want to start by sending my thoughts to those of you that have suffered in this terrible weather. We have been quite lucky here, we have a river out the front of the house which has been extremely high and almost come over the flood defenses a few times, but touch wood, it's not come over yet and hopefully it won't. The biggest problem we seem to have at the moment is the rear garden where our ornamental wildfowl live. With the ground so saturated at the moment, any rain we have is just sitting on the top and today it was ankle deep throughout 3/4's of the garden. I guess it's keeping the ducks happy tough lol
We had our first ducklings of the year hatch yesterday, 2 Khaki Campbells, from the only ducks we have that are laying at the moment. We also have another 12 in the incubator with 3 weeks to go and have just topped up the incubators with a mixture of Pekin Bantams, Lemon Millefluer Sablepoot, Black D'Anvers, Gold Laced Polish and a few others. We now have both incubators running, but the MS Broedmachine has 31 eggs that are due to hatch on the 20th (All from our Sablepoots, D'anvers, D'uccles and Serama), so once they go down to the hatching try during the week, we will be able to move the ones from the Brinsea Octagon into the Broedmachine, which will all be due on the 27th.
We have already had a few smaller hatches this year, the last hatch was a mix of Pekins, Polish and D'uccles with a few others thrown in, that are now coming up to 2 weeks,
We have added to our breeding groups, so now have Gold Laced Polish, Black D'anvers, Chamois Polish, Lavender Splash Pekin Bantams And a mixed group of Silkies to go with our Sablepoots and D'uccles. We sadly lost our Serama boy, and I have a young one we're growing to put with our girls. We're also growing on a pair of Silver Millefluer Sablepoots, which will be laying in about a month or so.
At the moment, the only birds we have laying are our Gold Laced Polish, Lemon Millefluer Sablepoot, D'uccles, D'anvers, Japanese Quail and Khaki Campbell ducks.
I'm hoping to announce some exciting news (for us anyway) next week, so as they say..Watch this space :)
Keep safe!
