Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

The question is: did this duckling make it? And the answer: yes it did!!! And what we particularly love is how Apple got closer and closer in order to offer encouragement. In the final photo she really looks as though she is saying 'go on, you can do it...'.
This little chap(ess) is one of five ducklings being brought up by Apple. Five is not a great number considering she was sitting on at least a dozen at one point but as explained on 11th of this month, Apple and Banana were side by side when sitting on their eggs and we think the eggs got a bit mixed up. This led to some rather 'spread out' hatching with the result that the Apple hatched out three and then left the nest. Some of the remaining eggs however contained still-growing ducklings and so we popped them in one of our incubators in the hope they would then hatch out. To date, two have died in the shell (we think they just got too cold and/or dry before we managed to rescue them), two have hatched (so giving us our current total of five ducklings) and two are still in the incubator.
What has been interesting here is how we have been able to give Apple two more ducklings two days after she hatched the original three and left the nest! If we tried to do this with a chicken we would probably not have the same success at all. Usually, once a chicken has 'hatched' her brood she becomes very focused on that set of chicks and will peck any new ones that go near. It seems this is not the same with these Muscovies. When we gave Apple the extra two tonight, she hissed a little at us but then quite happily let them crawl under her wings to keep warm.
At the last count (including a few more Legbar chicks that hatched overnight and today), the 'youngsters' on the smallholding now total 137, 112 of which are the poultry!!