Raising Ducks
Basics
Duckling diary
Management
Housing
Eggs
Links/Resources
Movies
and please note:
The duckling diaries
Raising ducks: weeks 4-6
Yes, I am one hot little duck.
June 30, 2002: The ducks are now six weeks old and have been living
outside for two and a half weeks. One morning in their fourth week, when
I went in to the brooder to take them out to
their grazing pen for the day, I found Patsy
running around the outside of the brooder peeping at the top of
her little lungs. (All the others were running around the inside of the
pen peeping at the top of their little lungs. Where the heck is Patsy?)
So I picked Patsy and the other six ducklings up, took them outside, and
that was the end of life in the brooder.
They were more than a little nervous their
first night in their pen, but with some encouragement
(in the form of lettuce) they let us herd them in, and we kept a 25-watt
light bulb on all night to keep them calm. After a few days they were
used to the situation, and we reduced the light to 15 watts, where it
will stay. The light should, we hope, keep them calm at night while warding
off predators, and won't be enough to mimic sunlight and increase egg
production.
After a few days of this they settled into
their routine: out to the grazing pen in the morning, back under the deck
at night. We have found that herding them is easier if you have lettuce
as bait, but they want to get out to their pool in the morning, and when
the sun starts going down they want to go in—presumably they feel
safer under the deck.
As before, you can read on about their growth and development and some notes on feeding or skip directly to the photos.
Growth and development
All seven ducks have all their feathers now; they have come in steadily
over the past three weeks. A few of them have a bit of fuzz at the backs
of their necks, but otherwise they are feathered out. Their growth has
leveled off as well, as we would expect; by eight weeks they will be all
but full-grown.
And they finally sound like adult ducks.
When one of us goes out to check on them, when they are running around
the yard, when they run out of food or want to go out in the morning or
in at night, when they are eating, grazing, bored, excited, whatever—somebody
quacks, and then they all start in. Constant chatter. But it isn't loud
enough to be a nuisance; our next-door neighbors confirmed this week that
they didn't know we had ducks. (They seemed mildly amused to learn that
we had livestock living in our backyard, but didn't really care one way
or the other.)
Feeding
We ran out of starter feed and switched them to the Mazuri waterfowl
breeder feed when they were about four weeks old. They'll remain on that
as long as they are laying eggs, so I hope they like it. We feed them
morning and evening, when they change pens, but if we notice in the afternoon
that they have run out of food we give them a half-scoop to tide them
over. Some days they eat more of their duck chow than others; it seems
to depend on how good the foraging is. When we move their grazing pen,
the foraging is really good the first day, and they don't eat as much
kibble.
They seem to be very good at foraging, some
better than others. Francie has developed a strategy for catching the
flies that collect on their food bowl: she hangs back, waits for them
to arrive, then lunges in to snare a fly; then she hangs back again, waits
for the flies to return, and gets another one. The others haven't caught
on to this yet, but they have their own methods I suppose. Polly will
very quickly eat any bug that falls into the pool. Saffy is still the
best at identifying new sources of food: when our chokecherry tree littered
part of the yard with berries and we let the ducks into that area for
the first time, she immediately starting eating berries and spitting out
the seeds.
And finally I will note that they are going
through an incredible amount of water. In addition to the water they drink
from their pool, they go through about five gallons of water a day. True,
a fair bit of that ends up splashed on the ground, but most of it seems
to end up in the ducks.
Photos
Click any of the photos below for a larger image.
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Mugging
for the camera.Next: Weeks 7-10
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