So, Razzi and the ducklings have now left the shelter of casa Kristian y Adriana. This is the last photo I have of them at their condo abode:
I'm fairly impressed, and relieved, with how Bropey has stepped into the role of protector and is looking after Razzi and the ducklings. We've also noticed how brown he is getting, after having either black or dark green feathers only a couple of weeks ago.
Last photo for this post: where ducklings come from.
These and more photos have been added to this photo set.
By the way, if there are any ducks out there reading this in an egg-laying mood, we have three spacious and well-kept planters available, free of charge.
We were starting to wonder when they were going to hatch, if ever. As it turned out, we were a week off of when we thought Razzi actually started sitting on the eggs. To see the first duckling appear this morning was absolutely amazing. To see another breaking out of its shell was incredible. At the last count there were ten ducklings.
I wanted to get photos and possibly video, but without disturbing Razzi constantly. So I set up my camera on a tripod and configured it to take a photo every minute. I also set up my phone to stream video to http://qik.com/daecks so we could watch the actual video stream. At around the fifteen second mark in this video: http://qik.com/video/5594953 you can see the duckings moving about with Razzi staying guard.
Near the end of the day, Razzi had to leave to go feed (as if we didn't feed her enough already), so she 'trusted' us enough to leave the duckings alone with us looking on. I was able to grab this video (no audio since I was shooting through glass so you couldn't hear them anyway) while she was away:
To close it out, here they are looking pretty exhausted, and a link to the Flickr set follows:
One of the Muscovy ducks that hangs out around our place is called "Razzi". Meet Razzi:
I noticed one day that the calla lillies in one of the planters on our patio were all flattened. I uncovered a bit of debris from the flattening and found two duck eggs. Anyone who knows farmer boy PK could guess that I was absolutely over the moon! A week or so later, the planter looked like this:
We're expecting that sometime this week the eggs will hatch. Razzi is patiently waiting for this to happen, albeit with the probably-too-often intrusion from some inquisitive humans. Eh, at the end of the day, she seems to be pretty chill about it:
Yes, but it's not the type of photo one might associate with that magazine. Yonks ago while on a road trip with a couple of other Aussies, I noticed a sign advertising a brothel called the "Shady Lady Ranch". I was able to quickly snap a photo of the sign as we flew past it (I'm still using that 200mm zoom lens, I love it), posted it up online and never thought of it again. I was contacted by Playboy magazine for permission to use the photo in an article on the ranch. I never did receive the free copy of the magazine I requested, but I was able to track down the Oct 2009 issue which had the article, shown below.
