With chickens and ducks, there seems like there is never a dull moment.

The day started off normal. All was well. Everyone was healthy and happy. We let the ducks and chickens out like usual to free range.

At the end of the day, I noticed one duck was missing. We finished putting up the rest of the animals and began searching for the duck. We ended up finding a dead chicken by a bush on the side of the house. It looked like it had been mauled…half it’s side was gone. Intestines were no longer there and it’s leg was missing. Not good!

We ended up finding the duck in the front yard by a bush. Walking up to the duck, the duck tried to flee with one foot dragging. Blood was on it’s side and belly by the leg. When we picked her up, the leg hung to the side. It didn’t look good. I wasn’t sure if the leg was dislocated or nearly ripped off.

We brought the duck in. We weren’t able to get a good look at the wound. The wound seemed to be right where the leg met by the body. She still had all feathers intact. We sprayed the wound with vetericyn. Then we placed gauze pads under the leg by the wound and wrapped the leg to her body with gauze roll.

We placed her in a large tub with old clothing lining the bottom. We gave her water with electrolytes to drink. The next day her leg was still limp. We changed her dressings again. The bleeding had stopped but we went ahead and placed a gauze pad by the wound again.

On the third day she held her leg against her body…it was no longer just lying there. Which I’m taking that as a positive! She also started standing on her good foot while keeping the other foot curled.

As I’m typing this she is drinking, quacking, and standing up on one foot occasionally. I’m not sure where we will go from here. I don’t know if she will start to use her foot on her own again. I’m going to do research to see if anyone else has had this problem as well.

We are not sure what had injured our duck or killed the chicken. They are from our 2018 batch and this batch loves to cross the street once in a while lately. We are not sure if they were hit or if the neighbor dogs had come onto the property. Both animals were found far from the road, by our house. There were no feathers anywhere to indicate they were hit. Still it’s a possibility that they were hit.

You can check out our video below. Abram has named the duck Quackers. 🙂

EDIT: I’m adding to this post just to keep everything together!

Two days after the video Quackers began moving around more in the tub. We put down stuffing and laid out trash bags to keep the stuffing dry. She was back to doing what ducks love best: putting her beak in the water, splashing around, and pruning herself. Even though we had a small bowl for her, she was getting water everywhere!

We bought her a small blow up kiddie pool. Which we put together a video for you to see her progress:

After several days with the stuffing, I noticed Quackers wheezing. This was a day after we had made the video of her in the pool. Since we had already taken her outside the day before we decided to put her on the deck and let her stay out there. This fixed the wheezing problem. We also had warm days with cool nights so I knew she would be okay out there. Plus, we had the pool on the deck so she could hop in whenever she wanted to and make a mess with the water.

She eventually made her way down the deck and into the backyard several times.

4/27/19: Quackers is using her foot more, allowing her to get around better. Last night was the first night she slept in the coop with the other chickens and ducks. I’m excited to see such progress and will keep you all updated! 🙂

5/2/19: Quackers has been staying in her coop each night. She has been using her leg more but sometimes I see her lift her leg when she is standing, looking around. Overall, she is making a good recovery!

5/19/19: She is getting around much better, has a limp and still holds her leg up sometimes. Overall, she is healthy and has no problem getting around which is great!

6/24/19: I would say Quackers is about 95% healed. She walks okay but once in a while she stick the leg that had been hurt in the air for a couple of seconds. Other than that, she walks fairly normal.