The Duck Family – 1

We have new family members – 3 ducklings! “How comes”, you might ask, well the answer is a long story.

Our neighbours above us had a duck breeding on their balcony. Since we have a flat “hanging” over a harbor (difficult to explain, check out the home page of our house) below our apartment/flat is the harbor in Hamburg.

So, last Sunday (July 13th), they finally hatched. It seems there were about 9 eggs, out of which five made it down to the harbor very fast, i.e. within about 1 hour after their mother starting calling them from down. The mother was swimming in the harbor and calling them to jump down.

Five of them jumped down and the others were “tweeting” all the time and we were anxious to see them jump as well. Problem there was that our neighbors were on holidays, so we couldn’t do anything but wait. The same for the mother…

It took such a long time that the mother gave up, especially since the five swimming around her were getting more and more tired. So she left and went to place in the harbor where she could go ashore with her ducklings. The other four finally jumped down. BTW: I never knew that these small thingies could jump down about 20 meters (60 feet) without anything happening to them.

By the time they jumped, the mother had left and gone so they started calling for her and searching, and searching…. and it was getting really cold.

My wife and I went for dinner thinking that, well, the mother will probably come back and they’ll all make it.

When we came back from dinner, it was already very cold (this being Hamburg, very cold in Summer means really cold!). From far away, we could hear two of them tweeting very sadly – it was really sad, looking, searching, well yes, yearning for the mother. When we arrived where they were, I could only make out two of them. One of the two was already giving up. They were stranded on a piece of plastic in the water, half in water, half on “dry plastic”.

One of them was already giving up and not sitting anymore but lying – the other one was getting closer to the first one and getting more and more silent. It was a picture like from Titanic. The picture was so sad, it looked for me like the one getting closer to the other one was thinking:

Well, if we have to die, then lets die together.

I’ve probably never seen something sadder than this in my life. Normally I’d say, well, it’s the nature and we can’t interfere. But this picture was so sad, I nearly cried.

It was low tide, so I couldn’t reach them directly. To make a long story short, I found a rope, roped down (about 5-6 meters) to the harbor and picked them up with a racket on a very, very long stick.

After picking up and climbing up again, I put them in my T-Shirt (still warm). One of them was already nearly dead, it was so cold I was afraid it’d die. The other one was a bit less cold. They were shivering like … well, like a man spending his last 2 hours in 6 degrees water in 8 degrees outside temperature.

Then we heard a third one tweeting somewhere. That one was easier to catch.

When we brought them home (still in my T-Shirt), I switched on our oven to 50 degrees for about 5 minutes (hoping to reach 35-40 degrees centigrade) and put them in the oven. After nearly one hour, they stopped shivering and started cleaning themselves. But still, they really looked nearly dead.

We left them in the oven overnight, gave them some food (oatmeal) and hoped they’d survive until tomorrow.

Well, yes, they survived and we have now three more family members – for another 5-6 weeks.

A while ago, I had setup a “grass basket” for our cats (a plastic container about 100×50 cms size to grow some grass for the cats).

Now, we put that plastic container in the bathroom (shower), have a small “house” on it for the ducklings, a small “swimming pool” (15x15cm deep enough to swim) and they are slowly but surely getting really strong – feeding on oatmeal, eggs, and other stuff for vitamins.

I believe, especially because of the T-Shirt-issue, they think I’m their mother now and want to follow me out of the bathroom when they see me.

Unfortunately, there is no place in Hamburg where you could bring them to grow and where there is someone looking after them. The zoo doesn’t want them, the animal shelter would use them as cat and dog food (as we heard) and there is nothing else. So currently, we are considering setting up a large “cage” on our big balcony (luckily we have a very big balcony) for them to grow for another 5-6 weeks until they can fly and then bring them to a nature reserve outside of Hamburg.

For the next 5-6 weeks, this means for us: feeding, cleaning (those ducklings can generate really a lot of … dirt :-), swim-training with them in the bath tub, and so on. And in about 5-6 weeks, teach them to fly (that’ll be fun :-); A colleague was already asking if I’m planning to build an ultra-light-weight airplane like the one in the movie “Flying Away”…

The funny thing in fact is that our cats aren’t really up to eating them. Instead, one them (Tiger) was first afraid and now is nearly playing with them (actually, they come to Tiger and Tiger stands there, smells at them, and they hit him with their beaks and he just stands there). We’re not sure about Micky, so the bathroom is of course closed when we’re not in the bathroom.

Since they are staying with us for some time, we decided to give them names. How we call them? Well, they are called Tick, Trick and Track, which are the German names of Huey, Louie, and Dewey – Donald’s nephews… well, naturally, they are Ducks
Here are some pictures…

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I’ll probably keep reporting or at least keep posting pictures – so, stay tuned…