DUCKS!!!!!! My favorite animal on the homestead!!!!
How and why did I start with ducks??
When I got married, my husband and I were blessed to find a small, 1.5 acre, acreage we could afford. This is where we made our home for nearly 7 years. A couple years after moving in, I started to think about animals. I had heard about chickens and how they peck and scratch and how the roosters can be mean. I had no intentions of getting pecked as I gathered eggs. I started to do research and found ducks!! They lay very respectably, and are not known to be aggressive, although any animal will have some aggressive ones. They are also cold hardier and more resistant to diseases than chickens. So, I decided to go with ducks!!
My husband is a wonderful man, and he had no qualms about getting animals. We planned on getting them about a year later. That gave us enough time for a lot of research and preparation. But……. A friend of my husband’s randomly called and asked if we wanted ducks. We said yes! I ran to the nearest dollar general to grab a kitty pool and we grabbed some wood shavings from my husbands livestock trailer, put some peas in one bowl, and water in another and all of a sudden we had 10 fluffy little ducklings.
After that, we had to scramble a little. We went to our nearest feed store and got food, a heat lamp, and proper stuff for ducklings. I also started to research a lot!! We didn’t know what breed of ducks they were or how to care for them. We learned that they were Hybrid White Layer ducks which are known for their egg laying abilities. However, in my researching, I found other breeds I wanted…. so I went down the spiral of duck buying and got those breeds too. We setup the back of our garage as a small coop and the rest is history.
I learned how to tell a male from a female, and my first problem was figuring out what to do with the excess males. It is best to keep 1 male to 4 to 5 females so I needed to get rid of some. I found a butcher near me who would butcher ducks and got them in our freezer. I learned there is not a lot of meat on these small birds so I looked into duel purpose birds. Birds that laid a lot of eggs and were a good size for meat. Fortunately, the two breeds I got after researching were Peking and Rouen, both of which are dual purpose breeds.
One down side to researching is you start finding breeds you want to get, but it’s not always the best idea to simply get all the breeds, especially if you want to hatch eggs that are purely of one breed or another. I have owned a male and female of 6 different breeds and finally narrowed it down to the 3 breeds I now have today which are Pekin (my favorite), Saxony (just because we had a special male Saxony who died), and swedish, primarily the black swedish (my husbands favorite). They are all duel purpose and sweet.
Duck pros
They are good layers.
Cold hardy
My ducks would rather sit outside in the snow than go back into their coop. Unless it is windy or snowing really heavily, they will be outside all day, sitting next to the door of their coop.
Good foragers
We have not had to deal with ticks or bugs much since we got ducks. They are active little things when it comes to insects. They also love dandelions, and other weeds.
Often calm and gentle
They are fun!!
There is nothing quite like watching ducks live their best life.
How about duck cons???
They are messy!!
We have experimented with food and water inside the coop and outside the coop. If you have water inside the coop you will need to change the bedding at least once a month but usually closer to every other week. They are super messy when they drink and they will try to bathe in it. We keep their water and food outside the coop now, and we only have to change the bedding once a year. We free range the ducks so they are only in the coop at night. If they are in during the day, we have to change bedding more often.
They need water.
All animals need water, but ducks need to get their whole head in the water for hygiene reasons. This causes some difficulties in winter when trying to make sure they get enough water to stay healthy.
They can be loud.
I like hearing my ducks quack away during the day, but the coop can be deafening especially when feeding them.
My final thoughts.
As messy as they are in water, I love sitting and watching ducks swim. It is very therapeutic. Once we get our big pond dug out more, I am going to put a bench by it so we can stop and just watch the ducks swim.
This is a heated dog bowl that is deep enough for ducks to get their heads into and it will stay thawed in the winter.
This is a nice small pool you can use for ducks for those without a pond.