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Day 1 |
Experts can "vent" ducklings at this age to sex them, but it is easy to hurt the ducklings and so it is not something that most of us should attempt. |
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Weeks 5-9 |
My ducklings all gained their adult voices between these ages. The females have a loud quack whereas the males have a quiet, raspy noise that sometimes sounds like a hoarse quack! The point is the males are very quiet by comparison. This is the first and best way to tell the sexes apart for most of us! |
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Week 5-8 |
Their beaks began to turn from similar dark brown shades from week 5 onwards. The photos below are from week 9! |
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Female beak - a browny, orange shade. |
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Male beak - increasingly yellow but with a greenish tinge. |
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Week 10 The boys started to develop these black patches around their beaks at around week 9. |
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At the same time, the boys developed the first of the green feathers which will give them gorgeous heads like their Dad! At this stage, it looked liked someone had taken a green felt tipped pen and drawn a few splodges on! |
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Female head. The ducks do have hints of green (apparent from week 5) but no bright green splodges. |
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Week 11 Having started moulting after the other boys, Marty has put on a little growth spurt and he is the first to show signs of his black, curly drake tail!
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This picture of Bruiser shows the new, dark brown breast feathers. At this point, both he and Marty have very scrawny necks as they are growing lovely new feathers. |
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On day 82, Marty (right) and Bruiser both have white
collars of feathers under their chins- developed almost overnight! |
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By three and a half months old, Marty and the other drakes have their full adult colours- very handsome! |
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As you can see from this picture of Sheldon, the ducks are beautiful too but in a subtler way with their mixture of browns, fawns and white! |
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What about our ducks? Click here to see who is going to be quacking in our garden!
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