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Majestic
Diary
March 3, 2009
Well... darn it... Tommy tested positive
for parasites. We have Winston & Mr. Pearl scheduled to
come tomorrow for a week of duck-sitting and I can't put
them in the quarantine pen. I will have to put them in The Gate House
instead. Which means Dutch won't have a pen... I'm going
to have to figure something out... maybe section off
part of another pen for him. Hmmmm...
We will treat Tommy, Obama and Demi all
for parasites since they are in neighboring pens and we
don't want to take any chances. I'll have to bump out
their "ready for adoption" dates at least 2 weeks. We'll
get them all better.
I was chatting with Jenn the other day
and was trying to explain our waterfowl tracking system.
Indeed, we do have one!
These are our two bird boards. The top
one is the nighttime schematic and the bottom one is the
daytime schematic. When new ducks/geese arrive, we take
a photo of them and make up 2 magnets for each bird (one for each
board).
Each board has the layout of pens
diagramed on it and each of the bird magnets are placed
in the appropriate pens. In case of emergency, someone
can come in and see exactly which birds are in which
pens during the day and understand where they need to be
moved that night. Each bird also has a medical file in a
file cabinet close by.
The boards are currently very similar to
each other because we are in the midst of some very bad
weather and the barn gang is staying inside for a couple
of days instead of moving outside.
Below is a close-up photo of the barn at
night. There are 5 kennels in the barn. Two of them are
currently empty. You can see who are in the other 3
kennels:
Each individual magnet tells a lot about
the bird featured:
The name of the bird is always across
the top with a photo of them below it.
The triangles in the upper left hand
corner indicate which birds we would like to adopt out
together (Dutch and Princess both have light blue,
matching triangles). Our retired ducks all have red
triangles. Benny has an orange triangle and Jelina has a
blue striped triangle. Neither Benny or Jelina are
currently paired off with another duck for adoption. 
Jelina and Benny both have a small
crutch on their magnet to indicate they have a limp on
one side.  
You won't see any featured here, but we
use 2 crutches for ducks who have issues with both legs.
Glory's magnet used to have this when she was with us. 
Jelina has 2 green circles on her magnet
which means she is wearing 2 green zip-tie leg bands to
help indentify her from the others.
Retired ducks do not have leg bands.
Aside from our retirees, Benny is the only other bird
here who does not have a leg band because we think we
are going to retire him. Every other bird here has
either one or two zip-ties on their leg to help identify
them. 
Each magnet also has a little pink or blue heart, which
indicates whether they are male or female. 
Also not featured above is our red eye
gif, which appears on the magnets of birds who are
either blind in one eye or have any type of eye injury
or scarring around their eye. We put two of these gifs
on the magnet of any bird who has sustained injuries to
both eyes. 
Combined, all of this information tells
the viewer a lot about each duck and goose and it helps
us communicate with each other as well. We also use the
wipe away boards to write notes to one another or
special instructions.
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