White-backed duck.
I love African white-backed ducks. Even as a duckling not even an hour old, this individual grabbed a hold of it's shell top and weilded it at me! They are super feisty, and super stressful! It is the age old countdown of teaching a diving duck how to feed before they fail.
These 3 have finally learnt the delicate art of ingestion. Teaching a diving duck to eat chick crumb is hard. They look at this powdered grub with distain, and wait patiently for it to jump! You might ask, why not feed live food? Live food is a difficult connundrum. In the wild inverts are not readily available, and the art of hunting them takes time, burns calories, and ensures a steady influx. Birds in captivity gorge which can cause growth defects, and then become addicted to live food. There is no feasible way of ensuring that this feeding regime can continue through adulthood either, as the birds are often moved on to other ponds with different companions, and to different centres. Live food often only saves the day in order to become a whole new problem... As such then, we need to make chick crumb look atractive.
We often choose a surrogate duckling, to act as a "show and tell" factor within the coop. These can be any domestic, teal or mallardy type, but our absolute favourites are Puna teal and Ringed teal. These brids hatch with an inate knowledge of what they are meant to stick their beaks into and try to eat, and if they are not too sure, they do it anyway! After a couple of hours with these surrogates and inevitably an empty tummy, the white-backs soon follow suit... or so we hope!
