Here are our two Silver Appleyard drakes. The one in the bottom photo is the alpha drake. He gets to have sex with the ducks. The one in the top photo seems to be the guard. When ever there is a threat, real or imagined, he is the one most likely to attack or fall back as a decoy.

Len, the beagle, is being chased off by the guard. He’s quite good at it.

Walking away in victory.

My sisters dog really was going after the ducks and it was interesting to watch the guard separate himself from the flock, draw attention to himself and seemed ready to take the fall. Fortunately, we got the dog by his collar and averted disaster.

Here are two of the ducks. I have a hard time telling them apart. There seems to be an alpha and then there is one that always seems to straggle behind.

Here is the duck house made by my husband and daughter. This photo was taken almost a week ago. It was time to clean out the house. I’m not on an exact schedule – it really depends on how dirty it is – one week I’ll just add pine flakes and the next I’ll remove it all, add it to the compost, let the duck house dry out and add a new layer of pine flakes about 4 inches thick. Now that they are full grown and they spend more time in the house with longer nights the poo accumulates more and I clean it more than in the summer. However, we are having an extreme cold snap here now – temps below freezing even in the daytime – so today I just scooped up the poo and left the pine flakes behind. I guess the poo froze before it had time to get smashed into the pine flakes.

The ducks aren’t very fastidious with their eggs. Sometimes they are on the cleaner end of the duck house but often they are right in the middle of messy poo. I was just cleaning them off with water and recently found that my Dr. Bronners Pure-Castile soap does a good, quick job of cleaning the eggs.