These are white crested ducks, and they are wonderful pets, and you can see nothing cuter.
I think the reason people find crested ducks so amusing, of course, is because of their
crest, which is a little genetic anomaly that occurred with a breed called a pecan,
which is widely grown.
These crested ducks make wonderful pets in the garden.
They're comical to watch, and they'll also eat a lot of insects once you're there.
These little guys were hatched on, like, the 3rd of March, and they're two-and-a-half months
old, so they're almost as large as they're going to become, but they're still juvenile
birds, so it's a little hard to tell which are the males and which are the females.
Now, eventually, what will happen is, on the back of the little bird, calm down here, you'll
see a little curl for the males, a little curl on the end of the tail, and the females
will not have that curl.
Also, by the sounds they make, the drakes are very quiet.
They don't make much of a sound.
This one may be a drake.
Females are the ones that quack really loudly, like, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack.
The drakes are more like, that's how they sort of talk.
I think you're a drake, yeah.
I think they're gorgeous because they have bright yellow bills, and blue eyes, and orange
feet, and, of course, this adorable crest, which looks like an Easter bonnet.
If you have some of these ducks as pets, just give them table scraps, and also make sure
most of their diet comes from a poultry food, and they love water, you can make sure you
need plenty of water for them.
And just so you know, crested ducks don't lay that many eggs, only about 130 a year,
and duck eggs are delicious to eat, aren't they?
Okay, so jump back in there.
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Okay, come on, let's play in the water.
You know, I have always loved geese, I don't know what it is ever since I was a little
kid.
There's nothing cuter than a gozzling, and we have three different types of geese here.
We have, well, we have those big, giant French doulap toulouse, and then we have the Pomeranians.
I like the doulap toulouse because they're so big, they're massive.
They're ganders from the way up to 38 pounds, maybe 40 pounds.
And then you have the Pomeranians, which are, I just like their color pattern.
They've got that gray and white, they look like big, whole, sting cows.
And then you have this breed here, which is a spasitopole, which comes from Russia on
the Baltic.
And they're curly feather, they have the colored feathered gene.
And so what we're doing here is that the problem is in the past we've hatched eggs in the incubator,
and it's been okay, but the mothers hatched them so much better than I've had success
with in the incubator.
So what I've been trying to do as a mother gets broody, meaning the female gets ready
to start setting on a clutch of eggs, and it takes 30 to 32 days to hatch a goose egg.
What can happen is other geese will go, hey, I'm going to lay eggs in this goose's nest.
So she might already have five or six eggs in her clutch that she's been sitting on for
18 days.
Then here comes another goose and lays a couple of eggs, and she continues to set on those.
And so what happens is the embryos are at different levels of development.
So that first clutch of eggs that she had laid that were already 18 days old once the
other eggs got laid, so they're going to hatch first, and the rest of the eggs remaining,
well, they'll just die.
So what I try to do is when a goose begins to get broody and sit on a clutch of eggs,
I try to close her off so other geese can't get in there and lay eggs.
And so what I've done is I'm trying several different things.
With one of them, I put a board up across there.
Once they get really broody and they want to stay there on that nest, then they're not
going to move.
So now what I'm doing, I'm trying something different.
I'm using wire across the front.
The next time I find a broody goose, what I'm doing is I'm going to just ease in there
and try to allow her, let me put a wire fence, if you will, across, mainly to keep other
geese out.
She could still come out from under it, but other geese couldn't push into her nest.
And then just put her a bowl of water there because they don't really eat or drink during
this period.
So that's the plan, because there's nothing any cuter than to see a mother goose, the
father goose, and a whole little flock or brood of gozzlings following along behind them.
So let's hope that I'm successful allowing a family of geese to hatch their own babies.
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For years now, I've been trying to raise swans.
I love mute swans, and we, for the first time, have some that are old enough to start laying
eggs.
We've kept them in this pen with these Sebastian Hole geese, which is a beautiful Russian curly
feathered goose.
But we've had trouble with them staying separated from the geese.
The swans really like to have their own space when it comes to the nesting.
They're very territorial.
Here's the cob, the male here.
You can see he has wings out in the fence mode.
He's trying to appear much larger than he actually is to scare us away.
And here's the pen.
And you can see just inside this crate, we found this crate, actually we had some stuff
delivered, and my sister-in-law came up with the idea.
You can see how they're moving, running the geese off, and there's an egg in there.
You can just see the egg from here, because she has gathered, and he has gathered all
of this straw and built this nest, so the crate idea seems to work before they were
trying to make a nest inside this pen, and I just think that they wanted their own space.
They wanted their own condo, and so that's what they have.
So she's laid an egg in there.
She feels like she's got some protection on all four sides, really.
See, look how they defended even against geese.
So my biggest concern is, even though these are very pernicious birds that can take on
even humans, a raccoon could come over and get some of these eggs, but all night long
the male guards the nest, and they're pretty tough, and you can see what they're doing
to these geese right now.
They don't want them anywhere near this nest.
It takes about 33 days to hatch a swan egg.
So what I'm hoping is, we've got one egg, we've got a nest, so they built a home, they've
made a very impressive nest with all kinds of straw that they've gathered up.
We have one egg as a start, hopefully she'll lay a clutch of maybe three to five more eggs,
and we'll get some little baby sickness.
Hey, if you're enjoying checking in with all of my children out here in breeding season,
check in regularly, because there's a lot going on, and subscribe to E.L. Pet.
Well, it's kind of a sad day here on the farm.
I've finally given up on the idea that Fred and Ethel might produce some little signets.
We had one egg left in the nest, and it clearly was a dud.
It did not hatch.
So here's the sad couple over here.
Good news is, this was really their first year, maybe their second year to try.
They have about 20 years of productivity ahead of them, so there's plenty of opportunities
for them to make a family.
These are mute swans, and they mate for life.
So I've got to keep Fred and Ethel together, or they'll be very unhappy.
You see, typically a mute swan, a mature mute swan will produce a clutch of about six eggs.
That's max.
And typically you'll see them out with about four signets.
Occasionally you'll see six out there, but usually it's maybe three to four little babies.
And so what we need to do is make sure that we have all the conditions right for next
year, so they start very early, often in January, building their nest.
And that's what happened here.
You see, last year, early in the season, right after the Christmas holidays, we brought this
old crate in here, thinking that maybe Ethel might like it.
She did.
She started building a nest inside it.
I was thinking that this crate would give them a little protection from predators, because
you see, there's an electric fence around here, but we can still get raccoons scaling
the fences.
We don't lock them up in here like we do the geese every night.
And inside there we have nests for the geese, but the swans will have nothing of that.
So that's why we set this up out here.
I'm going to leave this because they've gotten really familiar with it.
But next year, what I'm going to do right after the holidays, I'm going to come in and
put wire around this and try to protect it, where there's only one way in so they can
protect just one entrance.
So once we have all the protection that we can have in place, the next thing will be
for me to make this atmosphere a little more romantic for them.
We might do candlelight dinners for them.
They love that.
We might even have a tape recording out here of some of their favorite music, like Swan
Lake or something like that, just anything that's kind of helped the family process
along, if you know what I mean.
So really, for this debacle, I blame myself.
Next year, I promise, I promise, I promise, I tell you, we're going to make this place
more protective.
We're going to make it much more of a romantic getaway.
If you're enjoying these farm raise segments, let me hear from you.
I'd love to know if you have any ideas on how I can make this a little more romantic
for this couple.
Next year, we want babies.
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Okay, take a look at your house.
Any improvements?
Make a list.
Thank you.
