Duck Bathing: Round II

Sorry readers - I have no goat baby news for you. Stuffin still has a somewhat puffy feeling udder and is behaving vaguely strangely, but she isn't really bagging up and I think I can still feel tail ligaments (if I am feeling her right) so we must continue to wait. In the meantime, I'll do my best to keep your attention with the second round of duck baths.

The 11 ducklings from the Animal Rescue League seem to have stopped growing 2 inches a night, and instead they are actually putting some effort into feathers. This morning was bath time, so everybody piled into the tub for a good round of swimming, splashing and squawking, along with a few genuine quacks! They were less wet than last time when they came out, and everybody just had a good toweling off, and back into the "duck tank" for their breakfast. The older ones did begin to show an interest in adjusting their feathers during the bath, while the younger ones generally splashed about with wild abandon. I do notice that the ducks that had been guessed as being Blue Swedish are not showing any blue-ish feathering, and one of them actually has some brown tips coming in. I wonder if they are Swedish/Mallard crosses?

After their bath, it was time for Disston.
He takes up a large portion of the tub all by himself.
He is very thorough and vigorous with his flapping, and both of us were completely soaked by the time he was finished.
He is incredibly strong and we had to wrap him quite tightly in a towel afterwards to do some feather clipping. We have clipped his wing feathers so that he cannot fly away. He is now living out in the barn with the goats, because the weather has warmed up considerably here (well, it's 32F, which is 0 °C for my Canadian readers) and that is much more tolerable than the last week of temperatures. We hope he will develop an interest in the mice living in the barn. I have read in numerous places that Muscovy ducks catch and eat mice. How charming.

In other news, I went to my first meeting of the local spinners guild last night, and WHAT FUN! They are a great group and so very welcoming. All the husbands come with their wives and some of them are spinners too, while some of them are woodworkers. When I found that out, I called Kelly (having previously assumed he would not want to spend the evening sitting around with a bunch of ladies talking about wool). He was pleased with that and came hurrying over and ended up talking with the men-folk about tools and spinning wheels and I don't even know what else! It was their annual pot luck meeting so I brought some cookies and there was good food and wine to be had. They also did their annual gift swap but I hadn't been at the last meeting when they picked names, so I did not expect anything. I had mentioned to Lorraine, of Hedgeapple Farm (where we got Kitkat, Oreo & Clover) that I would be coming. What a sweetheart she was - she brought a gift of some beautiful rovings for me too! Fortunately, I had brought my batts of "Green Tailed Jay" from Butterfly Girl Designs on Etsy, so I was able to share a batt of that with her too.
They meet once a month, so we'll be back! In the meantime, I hope to do some more spindle spinning so that I actually qualify as a spinner!