Is a piece of bread going to kill a duck? No. Is this the fun police swooping in to ruin people’s good times? Not really. There is now a movement to educate people on the dangers of doing just that. I don’t know about you, but as a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to go to the park to feed the ducks some stale bread. Wet food can get moldy, and you don’t want your ducks to eat moldy food. Because ducks like to moisten their feed the food bowl often ends up with water in it. The feed bowl should be emptied and cleaned every day. An adult duck can drink up to a half gallon of water every day, so make sure you are checking the water levels often. It won’t hurt drakes & senior hens to eat layer feed, but maintenance feed will help them keep a healthy weight without the excess calcium.įeed should be offered free choice throughout the day along with access to plenty of fresh, clean water. If all your ducks are older and no longer laying, or if you are keeping drakes only, you can use a maintenance diet lower in protein (about 14%) and calcium if you want. Quality layer feed should have at least 16% protein and added calcium to help form strong eggshells. You won’t need to supplement with the brewer’s yeast anymore. You want to switch over to regular chicken layer feed (or water fowl layer feed if you can find it). Don’t go overboard, they should still be getting the majority of their nutrition from their feed.Īt this point, your duck is fully grown and will be getting ready to lay her first egg. click here to read more about angel wingĬontinue to supplement your duckling’s niacin intake with brewer’s yeast until about 20 weeks, and of course continue providing plenty of fresh water.Īs long as your ducklings have access to grit (sand or dirt) you can start to introduce treats to their diet. It causes the wing to stick out instead of laying flat against the body. Too much protein can cause a wing deformity known as Angel Wing. Mix in rolled oats, to replace up to 20% of your duckling’s feed. If you can’t find a lower protein feed, you can “dilute” your starter feed with rolled oats. You will want to switch to a lower protein chick grower feed (16-18% protein, still non-medicated). That is seven times bigger in just two weeks – imagine if your 7 pound newborn human baby grew to 50 pounds in just two weeks! Believe it or not, at 3 weeks, your ducklings will kick their growth into even higher speed!Īfter the 3-week mark, your ducklings will become little eating machines. By their one week birthday it will be about 100 grams and by the time they are two weeks old, they will be about 250 grams. How fast? A typical Mallard duck at birth weighs 35 grams. At the very least, get one with 18% protein.ĭucks grow fast. Try to find a high protein chick starter (20-22% would be ideal) for those first two weeks if possible. To facilitate this fast growth, you want to be sure you are providing your ducklings with enough protein. If you can’t find that, the second best would be to feed your ducklings chick starter crumbles. If you can find waterfowl starter feed this is the best option. But in the absence of waterfowl feed, what should we do? To save space and effort is it ok to just feed your ducks chicken feed? Early Duckling Stage (0-2 weeks) When we added ducks to our flock, I knew I didn’t want to go back to the mixed flock feed. Maybe it was just a bad brand, in either case, it made me leary of trying again. This leads me to believe in an effort to provide nutrition for different age ranges and species it is shortchanging birds in some areas. When my layer chickens were on the mixed flock feed there was a noticeable drop in egg production, and it is the only time we ever have seen the strange “no shell eggs”. Sounds like the perfect solution right? I didn’t think so, at least not that brand. It was marketed as being good for chickens, ducks, geese, & turkeys from babies to adults. I had tried the mixed flock feed once before with my chickens and was pretty unhappy with it. Way more people keep chickens than they do ducks, so chicken feed is generally much easier to find. While feed stores carry several kinds of chicken feed and a “mixed flock” feed, finding waterfowl feed can be harder. Feeding your backyard duck flock can be challenging.
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