u/ola-quilts43

Our four girls just started their molt about two weeks ago and the yard looks like a pillow exploded every morning. I sweep up feathers before letting the dog out because she thinks every one of them is a toy worth destroying.

Something I didn't expect when I started keeping ducks: how much personality variation there is even within the same breed. Mabel is bossy and always first to the pool, Junebug hangs back and waits until the other three are done eating before she'll even approach the food dish. People warned me ducks were basically interchangeable feathered lawnmowers and that has not been my experience at all.

Egg production has slowed down with the shorter days and the molt, which I expected, but I'm still getting two or three a day from four ducks which feels generous this late in September. I've stopped worrying about it and just let them do their thing. Forcing egg production with extra light always felt a little unfair to me, like asking someone to work through their vacation.

The pond situation got easier this year since I finally built a proper kiddie pool stand with a drain valve on the side. No more tipping a 100 gallon pool by hand every three days like some kind of fool. Water stays cleaner longer too since I'm not scooping muck out with a net, I just crack the valve and let gravity do the work into the garden bed.

One thing I'm still figuring out is bedding for the coop now that it's getting colder at night. Straw versus pine shavings versus the deep litter method, I've tried all three over the years and each has tradeoffs. Straw insulates well but molds fast if it gets wet, shavings are easy to spot clean but dusty, deep litter takes patience to get right but honestly works the best once it's established.

Curious if anyone else notices their ducks getting noticeably more vocal right before molt starts, or if that's just my flock being dramatic about losing their feathers.

I went down this rabbit hole because of gibbons, honestly. Watched a documentary about siamangs about four years ago and something about their vocal sacs and the way they brachiate just stuck with me. I started reading everything I could find, joined a couple forums, started planning zoo trips around which ones had a decent gibbon or siamang enclosure.

Fast forward to now and I've got a genuine soft spot for basically every primate family. Tarsiers freak me out a little but I still watch every video about them. Mandrills are probably my favorite to see in person because the color on the mature males is genuinely shocking the first time you see it up close, photos really don't do it justice. Even the less "charismatic" ones like aye-ayes or slow lorises have started to grow on me once I actually read about their behavior instead of just looking at pictures.

What's interesting is talking to other people in this hobby (if you can call it that) and hearing how differently everyone got into it. Some people started with chimps because of Jane Goodall stuff in school. Some people got obsessed after visiting a specific sanctuary. I've met a few who started because of pet primate documentaries and then went the completely opposite direction and became advocates against private ownership after learning more.

Curious what pulled everyone else in here. Was it a specific species, a trip somewhere, a book, a random YouTube rabbit hole at 2am. Always interested to hear the origin story because it's rarely the same twice.

I picked up a young English budgie (maybe 10 weeks old) to join my existing pair, and honestly the first week was rougher than I expected. My older female, Pepper, who's normally pretty chill, spent the first four or five days chasing the new bird off every perch and even blocking the food dish a few times. I had a second cage set up right next to the main one for the quarantine period, which helped, but once I finally let them share space I was bracing for real fights.

What actually happened was more like a slow negotiation. The new bird (still unnamed, my kids keep vetoing every suggestion) figured out pretty quickly which perches were "safe" and which ones to avoid until Pepper had eaten first. By day ten there was way less chasing, just some occasional beak fencing that never drew blood. Now at three weeks in, all three of them will sit on the same swing together, which felt like a small miracle after how tense things started.

A couple things I did that I think helped: I added a second millet spray and a second water dish so there was zero reason to compete over resources, and I rearranged the cage so there were more perches at different heights instead of one obvious "best spot." I also resisted the urge to intervene every time there was squabbling, since most of it was just normal pecking order stuff and not actual aggression.

Curious if anyone else has introduced a third bird to an established pair. Did your timeline look similar, or did it take longer to settle? I keep reading wildly different numbers online, anywhere from a few days to a couple months, so I'm curious what's typical versus what's just luck of the personalities involved.