Say "hi" to Jerry!
Jerry is the last New Zealand blue duck in WWT, British and European collections. As such he is not only a rarity, but inevitably; alone.
Jerry's normal home is at WWT Arundel where he resides in a beautiful spring fed exhibit designed just for him, but he longs for a bit of company! As such, this spring he has made a small migration of sorts to WWT Slimbridge where we are trying to introduce him to a companion.
Blue ducks can be fesity and aggressive, and would normally be kept in pairs separate from other wildfowl. In this case however the rule must be bent... We decided on a female call duck. She would be robust, with a healthy appetite, chatty, and sociable. He however had other ideas...
On his first night he jumped the fence and spent the night with the large group of Smew next door. Despite constantly putting him back we found that night after night he seemed to use those spring loaded legs of his to get over the fence with them.
We then moved the unlikely pair to another pen in the field. That night he used his winter roosting box as a trampoline and jumped in with the Hooded Mergansers. After yet another catch up, he got quite grumpy with us and stopped socialising at feed times. The call duck seemed to sense the tension and went straight into an instant body moult; poor girl..
The next night, an Eyton's whistling duck jumped in with him. The Eyton's fell in love with the call duck and Jerry finally got jealous. After the removal of the Eyton's, Jerry and his new companion seem to get on just fine!
Hopefully Jerry will be back to his old haunts in Arundel (call duck in tow) just in time for the season!
