Animal Tales - 20

Welcome to Animal Tales, the blog linky that brings together all sorts of animal blog posts from all over the world.  It runs from Tuesday morning thought to Friday night and showcases a wide range of animal related posts. 

First please note that there will be no Animal Tales next week as I will be leaving Normandy for a week and heading to the UK with limited Internet access. I will do my best to get round reading all the linked posts this week but please do bear with me if I take a while.  The next link up will therefore be April 28th.

Duck Update at Eco-Gites of Lenault

Regular followers of the blog will remember that I have a duck, Hilda, sat firmly on 8 eggs due to hatch in early May.  She was not happy sharing her pen with the other ducks so I put Harold, Hettie and Harriet in with the chickens.  So far so good.  Soon afterwards, Hettie started laying eggs, closely followed by Harriet.  I had no idea if either would sit (they are rather useless at this important act) but I decided to wait and see.  What I didn't expect to happen, though, was to find a chicken sitting on the eggs.  Actually it was a bantam cross chicken called Bianca and so she is large enough to cover 10 eggs.  I put the rest of the eggs in another next box and both ducks continued to lay.

Fast forward a few days.  There are about 14 eggs in the second box when I find my other bantam cross, Baptista, sitting on them.  Oh well - let's go with this ... although I did hive off a few of the newer eggs as 14 really is too many for a bantam to brood.

Fast forward again a few days and I find this: 

Hettie and Baptista "sharing" one clutch of eggs

I knew both chickens and the ducks had been squeezing in to lay extra eggs but I did not expect Hettie to try and sit AS WELL!  So I hived off half the eggs, plonked them in the next door nest box with her and left the three of them to get on with it.

Now I have 2 bantams and a duck sitting on a total of 20 eggs. They all regularly swap which eggs they are sitting on and I have absolutely no idea of any ducklings will appear at the end of this.  Watch this space!

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A big thank you to everyone who joined in to Animal Tales last week.  There was such a range of animals this week including dogs, cats, frogs, lambs, squirrels, birds, ponies and guinea pigs as well as a baby animal boom and a trip to the zoo.  Thank you.  A special mention this week goes to Fern Slightly Crazy and her wonderful tale of squirrel rescue. Do go and read if you have not already done so, it's a lovely story.

So over to you now.  Feel free to come and add your animal related posts to the linky below.  The posts can be old or new and as varied as the animals who we share our world with.  There's a Pinterest Board with pictures from all the linked blogs which you can see here and if you tweet with the hashtag #AnimalTales I'll retweet you.  Just give me a nudge if I appear to have forgotten you.

Full details of the linky can be found here but can I remind people of a couple of the "rules":

• Please can you comment on at least 2 other blogs linked up - that is, after all the whole purpose of joining a linky to find and comment on more blogs and hopefully drive traffic back to your blog.
• Please can you include my badge (preferably) or a link back to this blog.
• Can I remind people not to add sponsored posts or paid-for reviews.  Eco-Gites of Lenault has no advertising on it and I am not comfortable promoting products or companies I know nothing about.

<a href = "http://eco-gites.blogspot.fr/p/the-animals-tale.html" target="_blank"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTWk_wXWNaeBppKpUfOltxmxty2TjqFQsp9rmOyqt0UCtH0f_ztKM8Z10UcAdOvTtpYu_DxOXfjeaTgwD-YhaTOt-NtWdqcztKPqrjM7rPKf5GtOINTfiV3hpo-vz0wmZLAuhBdjlyvotq/s1600/Animal+Tales+Badge+Final.jpg" border="0"alt="ANIMALTALES"></a>

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