Buff ducks, boy rasps and girl quacks

We were greeted early today with cold and drizzle.
Blarg Monday.
Also a perfect duck egg! partially buried in the wood shavings under the roost stairs again.
I've come to the conclusion that both of Saturdays eggs were Whitney's, no wonder she was so tired!

On my break at work I admired photos of her pretty white egg and realised I'd taken a video of her Sunday morning frantic quacking

 

(It starts with Stevie rasping and following his ladies around)
for a while now I've been thinking of making a post about boy duck noises and girl duck noises, these are only my first babies and I'm still learning as I go. Still trying to figure out why they make some of the noises they do and what each different head bob means. But I do have a much better idea of girly quacks now than 22 weeks ago.  (I'm sure my first lot of ducklings will show me how wrong I am!)

These days Stevie is the chatty duck

 

He's not loud but this is what raspy boy noise is like. He's a good boy, keeps watch over his girlfriends and looks out for threats. Although if your duck is about 20 weeks old and has a curly tail and a different coloured head or is one solid colour like Whitney

 

 

then you are probably aware if it will eventually lay eggs or not

As 3 week olds it was Whitney who was the chatter

 

That's her quack at the start of the video, as a little duckie it startled her as much as everyone else. She found her voice at a much, much younger age than anyone else.

 

And her other favourite noise, 'look I've found a tasty treat!' or 'I'm excited about something!' it sounds similar to one of those soft toys that you tip up to make it moo, except you are shaking it really hard.
You can hear baby peeps from the boys too
Her quacks and noises don't change an awful lot from here, although she has learned 'angry duck cackle' when she's defending all the food from those pesky chickens or telling Chuck the cockerel to stop jumping on her back and the loud 'WAK WAK WAK WAK WAK' I'm not usually around when this one happens, I think they do it for attention?

 

And here is (mostly) 6 week old boy squeeks. If I had my camera going earlier you would also hear boy duck "where are my friends?!' shrieking as he was carried inside to frantically check what he'd done to his left wing tip. At the time I was much more worried about stopping the bleeding, covered in blood and looking like a serial killer to think of such things.
My guy settled in to the hospital box but chatted constantly with his duck buddies who hung around the windows as they missed him. You can hear whitney honk part way through.

(don't worry, I sorted out that wet patch of shavings, he had a bad habit of sitting in his water and wetting everything!)

And their first swim together after he got out

Whitney quacking and the boys peeping and squeeling (and being bitey)
Hopefully I'll have a better idea of who is who in spring when we raise a new batch of little buddies!