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You are here: Home / Pet Blogging / Duck Blogging / Respite Open Thread: The Duckteens Have Arrived

Respite Open Thread: The Duckteens Have Arrived

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Oh boy, we’ve entered the duckteen stage!

It’s time to spend time outside. Starting inside their pen so the big ducks could get to know them first, they quickly moved to exploring the yard. Despite Mabel protesting loudly, they always gravitate to wherever the big ducks are hanging, or follow them around the yard.

It started a little faster than I intended.  After two days spending time in their pen,  I opened the patio door to start the grill and they ran over and demanded to go outside. So, I popped them down the stairs and they promptly ran over to the big ducks. They have a death wish.

 

I decided to let them explore the yard as I prepped dinner, keeping an eye out, and they played nicely. So I put their pen away and now we are working on the transition to living outdoors. Maddie and Nora are my peacemakers, while Mabel is making sure everyone knows she’s the dominant duck in the flock, which Nikki interprets as a threat to Nora. So Nikki then takes on Mabel and I have to keep a close eye and step in on occasion.

More photos and a long video of their outside adventures here.  (And all the duckling photos/videos are here)

Right now they are driving me nuts because they can’t go outside, it’s much too cold and snowing. But we are probably a week out from them being outside permanently, so there’s that. LOL

I have to run out for most of the day, I suspect it’s going to be a busy news day, so use this as your thread to come back to for relief from the crazy.

Respite open thread

Reader Interactions

38Comments

  1. 1.

    Amir Khalid

    Wasn’t Penelope larger than Maddie and Mabel? I’m thinking it won’t be too long before Nikki and Nora are the big ducks, and there might be a shift in the balance of power.

  3. 3.

    TheOtherHank

    I’ve been waiting for another I Got The Shot thread, but haven’t seen one, so I’ll put this here. I figured out how to pull a subset of frames from my dashcam videos and made a time lapse of getting the vaccine at the Oakland Coliseum on 4/3/21: Zoom Zoom

  4. 4.

    eachother

    Love the video. Taking that video required patience as much as the flock joining effort.
    When I first got chickens, before the coop was ready, they lived in a box in the house. They were soon perching on the box edge. Then, to keep them entertained, we played ball until I realized I may be teaching them inappropriate behavior with an egg like object.

  5. 5.

    zhena gogolia

    Thank you! Your yard is a garden of earthly delights.

    I just love when they wiggle their butts.

  8. 8.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @Amir Khalid: Yes, but it’s probably more age than size. Penelope deferred to Mabel and I suspect these guys will, too. But Nikki fighting seems to mean Mabel won’t get too aggressive and hurt one of them.

  9. 9.

    evap

    So cute! I want pet ducks!! Open thread you say? I got some good news yesterday. I wrote a book last spring/summer (a mathematics research monograph, nothing exciting) and my editor finally managed to get two reviews. Both are very positive, so we are good to go! A month of some of final editing and polishing, then I send the final version to the publisher. If I get it in by early June (which will not be a problem), the book will be published in 2021!

  10. 10.

    cope

    I thought wrangling our seven month old terrier pup was a handful but that whole duck thing sounds exhausting. More power to you and keep the pictures coming (as if you don’t have enough to keep you busy). Thanks.

  12. 12.

    Another Scott

    One thing I’ve been curious about for a while – why don’t they fly away?  Are they too heavy?  Do you pluck certain feathers?  They just have no interest in leaving because the food and accommodations are so great, plus they get scritches?

    Curiously,
    Scott.

  14. 14.

    Miss Bianca

    @mrmoshpotato: Yes, she said grumpily, staring out the window at the 3-4 inches that fell last night and which are now covering the steep ‘n’ scary Driveway of Doom…

  17. 17.

    Another Scott

    @Benw: Neat, but a new cartoon is already needed.

    ScienceMag:

    Talk about raining on your colleagues’ parade. On 7 April, a collaboration of more than 200 experimenters announced to great fanfare that a particle called the muon is slightly more magnetic than predicted by physicists’ standard model, a discrepancy that could signal new particles waiting to be discovered. But on the same day, 14 theorists published a paper that suggests the consensus theoretical prediction is wrong. Their value sits closer to the experimental result and makes the tantalizing discrepancy nearly vanish.

    “The standard model is just fine, according to our calculation,” says Zoltan Fodor, a theorist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and the leader of the Budapest-Marseille-Wuppertal (BMW) collaboration, which produced the new theoretical result. However, others say it’s too early to throw out the previous calculation, which is the product of decades of painstaking effort. “We can’t immediately ignore everything we know and switch over to a single new result of a new method,” says Christoph Lehner, a theorist at the University of Regensburg.

    […]

    To make that prediction, the theorists had to account for the thousands of ways standard model particles can flit about the muon and affect its behavior. One family of processes, known as hadronic vacuum polarization, is especially challenging and limits the precision of the entire calculation. In it, the muon emits and reabsorbs particles known as hadrons, which consist of other particles called quarks. The theory of quarks and the strong nuclear force that binds them, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), is so unwieldy that theorists cannot calculate the effects through the usual series of ever smaller approximations. Instead, they have to rely on data from accelerators that create hadrons by colliding electrons and positrons.

    Never mind the gap?

    If a new “lattice” value for the magnetism of the muon is correct, a mysterious gap between other predictions and a recent measurement would all but disappear.

    There is another way, however. Theorists can attempt brute-force QCD calculations on supercomputers, if they model the continuum of space and time as a lattice of discrete points occupied by quarks and particles called gluons, which convey the strong force. Twelve years ago, theorists showed this “lattice QCD” technique could calculate the masses of the proton and the neutron, which are both hadrons. Several groups have also applied the lattice to the muon’s magnetism, albeit with sizable uncertainties.

    Now, using hundreds of millions of processor hours at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, Fodor’s group has produced a lattice calculation of the hadronic vacuum polarization and a value for the muon’s magnetism that rivals the consensus standard model value in precision. And the new result is only one part per billion below the experimental value, the team reported in Nature. Given the uncertainties, that’s too close to claim a discrepancy, Fodor says.

    […]

    It’s amazing how quickly cutting-edge science is being done these days.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  22. 22.

    Shakti

    So yesterday, I set my mother’s at home workspace up in her spare bedroom. Because she’s a Boomer and hates change she insisted on getting a Mac mini from Best Buy (because she had a mini before and likes physical stores).

    We got a web cam and a keyboard and plugged in a computer mouse. (She doesn’t like Bluetooth). We still need to get her a good thin monitor because her desk is the size of a postage stamp and she doesn’t want a VESA mount.

    Hopefully this will quell the fights my parents have over the “office” aka my father’s trash room which has a big iMac.

  23. 23.

    mali muso

    Quick duckling story from my childhood…  I think I was about 5 years old and spending the week at a friend’s house.  They had ducks and chickens, and we all had a great time feeding them and watching them peck and poke around the yard.  There was a duckling who was fostered with a chicken mother and her brood.  I guess the duck egg got placed under the hen and hatched alongside her chicks.  In any case, it was pretty entertaining to watch momma hen followed by a line of 4 fluffy chicks cheeping and one little duckling at the end of the queue, waddling along.  Even more entertaining when the baby duckling jumped into a pond one day and the chicken mom squawked and fluttered on the shore, terrified that “her baby” might drown.

  24. 24.

    Ken

    @Another Scott: Now, using hundreds of millions of processor hours at the Jülich Research Center in Germany,

    Such a waste, when you consider how many bitcoins might have been mined using that.

    I remember reading an explanation of how the theoretical calculations are done — might have been Feynman, if not then Hawking.  What I took away from it was there are an infinite number of sums of infinite series, most of which diverge, but if you’re careful most of them cancel out and you’re left with a problem that’s only horrendously intractable.

  25. 25.

    Benw

    @Another Scott: apparently the alternate calculation’s been “known about” for awhile, but not included in the formal calculation, and then the alternate team published their calculation on the day the g-2 collaboration released their result, as a FY to the formal calculation people, who are now super pissed.

    In short, theorists gonna fight.

  26. 26.

    BruceFromOhio

    The duckteens are quite talkative, there’s a constant running commentary. I admire your patience, commentary and headlines in the video – the cuteness overload is awesome!

    Thank you so much for sharing this, it is a most welcome respite.

  30. 30.

    catclub

    @O. Felix Culpa: :

    Ack! At first I read “Maddow.” But upon re-reading, I felt a lot better.

    I was impressed that Madoff is pronounced ‘Made- off’. How did they already know it when he was born.

  32. 32.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @Another Scott: I know it’s late in the thread, but you are correct, they cannot fly because they are too heavy for their wingspan. Much like domestic chickens, once you start breeding for breast size, it soon overtakes the wingspan and they cannot stay aloft.

    Maddie is my smallest/lightest duck and she can fly – and loves to fly – she will jump off the steps and fly, she’ll run and get some loft, about two feet off the ground and can fly for a few feet.

  33. 33.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    Thank you, thank you, thank you for this duckteen post!! So cute. I have been waiting impatiently and now it is here :-).

    In semi-related news: There are only 2 kittens in my foster kitten litter so there isn’t a lot of competition for places at the milk bar. Hence, both kittens have been gaining an average of 1/2 on ounce a day and look like fat tabby seals. They are very dedicated nursers! I think they’re a little more than a week old now. Their ears are coming unstuck from their head and the bigger kitten (the boy) has opened his eyes.

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