She was still alive this morning, I gave her the Baytril and also a tiny amount of liquidized carrots/oregano/garlic/chives/chili, hoping it would give some strength. Ben attacks me now when I get near, I had to catch him to give him his Baytril.
I went to see to the other ducks, and when I came back she was lying on her back, not stirring:
I have just buried her next to where Graham buried her mate April. It is so upsetting, I only received these two as a gift from Chris and Mike Ashton in April. It was so sudden an attack, so unexpected, as I hadn't seen a fox nor any sign of one since the one that took Beyoncé in the snow on 1st January.
I worry a lot now that I've lost 5 of my girls. If Ben recovers fully there'd be 3 boys to 8 girls, two of them with leg problems. Once Ben gets out again he's likely to be bullied by Jay and Tuts, anyway. Those two were having a monstrous fight in the duck run yesterday afternoon, with all the girls standing by and watching. They just would not stop, and as I was clearing some ground just behind the run I threw a small clay flower pot at them ..... which caught on the top of the ducks' food housing and shattered into more than a dozen pieces - it stopped the fight! It also scattered the bystanders!
The area behind the duck run had been crying out for attention for a long time, there was a big cold frame with now lots of rubbish in it, a small raised bed with overgrown parsnips, chard and some carrots from last year, and under the hedge to our neighbours John had stored endless old plant pots, plastic bags, some empty, some filled with I-don;t-know-what, and old wheel barrow again full of rubbish, so I finally tackled it yesterday.
As you can see in this photo there are holes in the hedge which any cat, dog or fox could easily get through, I need to secure that.
Although I was hoping against hope that Cheryl would pull through after treatment I couldn't really believe it, the vet said the same. She did manage to move through the sun lounge, changing her position, but the poor thing couldn't even lift her head, she was lying like this all the time:
Ben actually seems to feel safe in that cage, he goes into it voluntarily and hisses at me when I come near. Normally he's quiet, I can just hear him shuffle now and again. But at times I can hear his hoarse little voice shouting excitedly, and everytime that happens I can be sure that "his mates" are going by outside, this morning they even knocked at the door of the sun lounge! As Annie said on the phone this morning, I bet he's shouting at them "I'm here! Come and rescue me!"
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