Bath time at Janet’s for nine new arrivals. Photo / Greg Dixon
Janet, who lives just around the bend with Blokesy Stokesy, sent a text: “Guess what’s on our kitchen bench at the moment.” Knowing Janet, who collects animals the way some women collect handbags, I might have guessed that she had, say, a baby giraffe or a pygmy hippopotamus living on her kitchen bench. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. But there was a clue: a duck emoji.
They had a live duck living on the kitchen bench? Nope. They had nine ducklings swimming around in the kitchen sink. Their mama had been taken from the creek at the end of their driveway by a hawk. The evidence was a sad pile of feathers.
It was late afternoon and would be dark soon, and the ducklings were perhaps a day old. Blokesy Stokesy came to the rescue. He pulled on his waders, grabbed his fishing net and plunged into the creek up to his chest. They managed to catch eight ducklings. They knew there was one more but couldn’t find it. Later, when it was properly dark, Janet made a dash into town to get some duckling fodder. She stopped at the creek on her way back and heard the lone duckling calling. Blokesy Stokesy rushed to the rescue again.
So here we are, on a Sunday morning cooing at nine ducklings bobbing and diving merrily in a butler sink in a country kitchen. They are covered in chickweed and guzzling up mealworms. Blokesy Stokesy had removed them from the dog crate they spent the night in, stacked in a pyramid on top of each other. How do you move nine ducklings? You scoop them up in an old bucket. Then they are weighed in said bucket on the kitchen scales and their collective weight gain recorded in a notebook. You will be happy to learn that, between them, they are putting on almost seven grams a day. Then into the sink they go. We are all learning a lot about ducklings.
A quite interesting duckling fact: they are born without waterproof feathers. So they have to be put in the butler sink for a swim up to five times a day. The swimming stimulates an oil gland that will turn them waterproof, the equivalent of waterproofing your raincoat.
An irrefutable duckling fact: they are impossibly cute.
You think, horrible hawk to have killed the mama. Blokesy Stokesy lost his favourite chicken to a hawk. He is not very fond of hawks. We like to see them, lit by the sun from beneath, like a golden stained-glass window, soaring. But after hearing the story of Blokesy’s chicken, we do clap them off if our chickens and the cats are in the garden, which they usually are, being free-ranging country creatures.
A hawk is just being a hawk. They are also sometimes known as the possum buffet bird – they clean up roadkill. There is a geezer in Canterbury called Hamish who has an unusual bird feeder. He traps possums and stacks the carcasses for the hawks to find.
He calls this a bird buffet. In an interview with Predator Free NZ, he said it also kept the hawks off the road where they risked becoming roadkill themselves.
Some farmers believe hawks will take lambs. It is true they will strip to the bones an already dead lamb and they will sometimes take a sick, weak newborn. I knew a farmer who once sacked a farmhand for shooting at a hawk.