#miniature silver appleyard
Meet my six lovely ladies!!!!! After years of waiting, and then a few more months during lockdown, I finally have the gorgeous little flock I’ve always wanted (will properly introduce the boys in the next post!)
From left to right in the bottom photo: Daffodil and Gertrude, the Dutch Hookbills, Iris and Thomasina, the Miniature Silver Appleyards, and Effie (The Duchess) and Gwendolyn, the Welsh Harlequins!
They’re all about 3 or 4 months old and we drove up to Suffolk to buy them from Anglia Waterfowl about a month ago! I am deeply, deeply in love with them <3 <3 <3
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Gorgeous little Iris, the smallest of my ducks, a dark phase Miniature Silver Appleyard! She’s also my father’s favourite because she’s so pretty!
The first day when we got them home, we took the ducks out of the carrier one by one to ring them for easy identification before popping them in the small run attached to their houses, so they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the whole pen on the first day. Even though she was the smallest (they were all dinky then, most doubled in size in the next few weeks before we introduced the boys, but not Iris!) she fought tooth and nail to be put down, wiggling fiercely!
Since both Iris and Thomasina can fly, we’ve had to clip their wings (this doesn’t hurt them at all, but stops them from flying up and out of the pen and getting into trouble). Again, Iris gave us hell! She’s a super feisty duck!
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This is Thomasina! She’s a light-phase Miniature Silver Appleyard and she’s named after the man who originally bred the Minis, Tom Bartlett.
She may be small, but she’s super feisty and sassy! She has a very loud voice and is not afraid to use it! Sometimes when I’m in my room which is quite some distance from the Poultry Resort (this is what we call the main pen that houses the chickens (Hen Village) and the ducks (Duck Beach)) I suddenly hear a great big quacking sound and it’s often this little girl.
When we introduced the boys to the girls, Thomasina was not impressed! The others ran away from the boys (and the boys, being super nervous, also ran away) but Thomasina charged them. When they started to defend themselves from this little fury, she went for their ankles!
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