Our chocolate runner duck, Milt, needs to go. He is four months old and humping everything in sight! How do you wrestle being a modern feminist with the animal world? He will corner one of the ducks, bite the back of her head to keep her in place, then mount her. It doesn’t look fun, enjoyable or kind. It’s kind of a frustrating spectacle to observe on an insanely frequent basis.
We were down to just two hens, which is what you call female ducks, after our raccoon incident and they were getting bombarded by Milt. After a few weeks of searching, we found two sweet runner hens to add to our flock. They are a mother and daughter, whom we named Gladys and Ramona. Ramona is the daughter who is very slender and small, but fully grown and healthy.
Ducks have a pecking order, just like chickens. But they also seem more flock-oriented than chickens. So we decided to just introduce them all in the enclosed run and see what happens. Well, it didn’t take long for Milt to make his presence known.
He is just relentless! Every time the ladies seem to be enjoying the sunshine or settling in for a nap, Milt has to run over and ruin it. We want our ducks to be peaceful and calm. And we want eggs, not babies. So after a week of “seeing how it goes”, we’re over it. Milt needs to go! (Pictured above left to right: Gladys, Ramona, Bess, Milt, Pepper)
Roosters can be really hard to re-home, but we are hopeful that a local farm might need a nice purebred drake. We’ll give it a few days, but if it doesn’t happen quick we may be eating duck for dinner.
I bought “straight run” ducks once–we ended up with some 13 males to 2 females. It was awful. My kids sure got a sex education from them–not the kind I wanted them to get! Gang rape on a daily basis. I would “break it up” every time I saw it happen, to try to preserve my poor females’ dignity. Then once I “broke it up” between two ducks, and they got right back together. They were both bobbing their heads and quacking at each other, and I finally (after breaking it up many times) figured out that this female was consenting, and even an equal part of the mating ritual. It was very sweet to see the difference. π
Elizabeth, this is so helpful to know! I think Gladys maybe missed him a few days after he left – she was doing the head bob thing. But since then everyone seems to have adjusted quite well. Oh, duck adventures!