Weather and ducks

Now the temperature is just above freezing and it is raining...a lot!  Today there's also hail, wind and thunder.  The snow is slowly melting but the compact snow is like ice sheets and a lot of water is collecting in the fields:

We lost one more critter due to the weather.  On Friday our last remaining Magpie duck died.  I had put him in a pen with food and water, and I thought he would make it out of the weather, but Tom found him dead that morning.  I had purchased Magpie ducklings from Holderread's in 1998 to eat slugs.  In 1999 I purchased Pekin, runner and white golden hybrid ducklings from Metzer's.  They ate slugs quite well, but the bald eagles ate them.  I finally figured out that if I put them in an enclosure with string or netting that the killing (and the slug eating) would stop but by then we were down to three ducks- a Magpie drake, a runner hen and a hybrid hen.  You can see them in the photo below from 2005 with the first batch of ducklings they produced:
Now our last rare purebred Magpie is gone.  He lived 10.5 years and likely had a good duck life.  Although we do not have any more purebred Magpies, you can certainly see his influence as well as the runner duck's influence on the ducks we do still have: