Can ducks and chickens live together?
by Poultry farmer – Miriam Rolling| Last Updated– 09 January 2021
I sold it all, moved to the country and built my own log cabin with my own two hands. Now I spend my time discovering new ways to live a simple, healthy lifestyle with more free time and way less stress, then sharing what I’ve learned with you. Welcome to Jennifer’s homestead chickens together in the same floor.
My answer is no. And the reason being is docs are bigger and stronger than chickens. And the ducks will push the chickens out of the way and chase them away and eat all the food. And so the chickens won’t be able to get enough food because the ducks are so mean to them.
They know they’re bigger and stronger and actually ducks are smarter. And they’re just so many, they’re very pushy to the chickens. So that’s why I don’t keep the ducks and the chickens in the coop together. I want to make sure that everybody gets along. Everybody wants to live a peaceful life. So the chickens don’t want to be chased all the time by the docs. It’s just not a happy life.
Ducks are smart, strong, and Hardy compared to chickens, ducks, eat a lot of bugs without scratching up your plans and your mold and your seedlings. A chicken can scratch up a garden and destroy all your hard work. And a couple of hours. I’ve actually had that happen to me more than once. And it’s very frustrating. That’s why I have a fence around my gardens and I keep the chickens out.
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No chickens allowed ducks only. And it’s so depressing and heartbreaking when you’re like loving your guard. And you’ve got it all set out when you come home and there’s like a chicken in there and your whole gardens torn up. You just want to cry. That’s what I felt like.
So the ducks need a little pool to get into because they have to clean their feathers and then they, you know, clean themselves. And also they breed in water. So if you want baby ducks and you have a male and female, they’ll need the water to breed in to make the babies dogs hatch out more babies than most chickens. I noticed it’s because mama dog will collect up more eggs in her nest before she starts to sit on them. And how that works is they belay one egg a day and they’ll still walk around.
And every day, the lay and egg laying an egg, an egg, and told the pile in the nest gets really big. And then they’ll start to sit on them to hatch them out. So, you know, the mama duck, for whatever reason, they just hatch out more babies. And I don’t know if that’s because they are more Hardy or what the reason is, but that’s just what I noticed.
They’ll hatch out more and more often than a chicken. Well, a duck takes 28 days to hatch her babies and chickens take 21 days. So the ducks take a little longer just in case you have a mama duck sitting on the eggs and you’re wondering like, Oh, you know, how long is it going to take for the babies to come 28 days?
It is important to know that daddy, doc will soon try to kill his babies. And it’s so interesting. And you’re like, why? But pretty soon once they’re hatched, the little ducks will be getting around pretty well, but they’ll still be little daddy talk, we’ll start being mean to them and like chasing them away, like really aggressively chasing them away. And there’s so many of them that mom and dog cannot protect them because they all kind of just scatter everywhere and it’s chaos. And just to keep, you know, keep aware of that and watch out for it because if the daddy duck was too mean, I would move daddy duck for awhile and he would live alone and let mommy bring up the babies. Just so the little baby ducks, aren’t tortured by daddy.
Doc ducks need to be protected from predators at nighttime because owls will get them. That’s what loves to get dogs or owls. So you have to put them away at night during the day, they can like kind of run around and they’re hardier than chickens.
And so for a duck, you have to really pin the door’s shot because what happens is ducks are very strong and pushy at night time. So they’ll push the door open if you don’t bungee shut it. Bungee cord is shot. And the thing about the ducks is at nighttime, they will go right in there. Like they want to go to bed at night and they feel safe in there. So I don’t have any problems with them being loose and like getting them in there at nighttime, they’ll go right in and I don’t feed them in there. I might just sprinkle a tiny bit of little something in this bowl. So they’ll get a bite to eat and go in easy.
It’s almost like a little treat to get in there, but I don’t put a lot of food in there. And I just have a little, just a little bucket of water just to make sure if they’re thirsty, they can get a drink in the morning before I come out, ducks eat pretty much what chickens eat. They’re very, very similar in that. And so what I do is I will just start them out on the little chick starter. If you buy the baby ducks in the store to get going, um, just by the non-medicated, if you can get the organic, get the organic it’s even better, but whatever, try to get non-medicated chick starter. And that’s what the baby ducks will eat. When ducks eat, though, they kind of eat and drink, eat and drink. They’re kind of messy. They go back and forth. And in that sense, they’re messier than chickens.
Once the ducks get a little bit, you can start offering them the cryptos, which they’ll start eating those. And then when they’re even a little bigger, you can give them the whole corn and ducks really love whole corn. So, you know, add that to their diet as they get older. And, um, then you can give them in the winter time if they need a little more protein, cause there’s not as many bugs, just as exactly like the chickens, you can give them some high quality kibble, cat, kibble, and mealworms. They love mealworms. They will get into the chicken food and just shovel that food. They will overeat. Your ducks will just gobble all that food up while chasing the chickens away. So your egg production on your chickens will start dropping and you’ll be paying money at the feed store, buying more feed. And those ducks will just be getting fatter and fatter and fatter and ducks are also very messy and poopy.
So your coop will be disgusting. You know what I mean? Because they’ll just be so big and eating so much and making it very messy.
let me talk about the braids of ducks. Cause there’s lots of different breeds of ducks and when they’re little, they pretty much all look the same. And you’re just like, Oh, it’s a cute little yellow ducky little fuzzy dog. They’re not all the same. There’s many different braids and those, um, there’s the white, I want to say peaking docks. I don’t even know the names of them, but when they grow up, they’re just those big fat kind of typical white docks. I stay away from those just because they eat so much and they’re so messy and you know, who wants a mess to clean up all the time? I like to go for the ducks that will well, all ducks eat bugs.
So they’re all good at that. So I like to go for the breeds that are smaller yet. So they’re, you know, less messy, smaller, because they’re less messy. That’s my motto. So I love the runner docs. Runner docs are long, tall ducks, but they’re like slender. They’re skinny dogs and they can really get around the farm. They’ll go in the field to get bugs. They’ll go in the pasture to get bugs. They’re just awesome little bug eaters. And as you can see, they walk really, really well. They can, they can really get around the other breed. I really love for the garden. And this is if you’re just going to lock them in the garden full time are the little call docs. They are adorable through like little mini docs and they’re white and color. Usually if you get them pure bread and they’re just precious, they are the cutest little things ever.
And they do well in the garden. You know, they’ll eat bugs around, you know, they’ll the little call ducks will dig in the soil more because they’re little, you know, they can’t reach up the plant to pick a bug off. Like those runner ducks can the runner ducks like look up there for a bug and they’ll get it. So they’re actually better for eating the bugs. The runner ducks are, but the call ducks do the job and they’re adorable and precious. So those are the two breeds I personally recommend. If you want to, you know, just keep ducks and have fun with them and not have too messy of farmer gardens. Also the water from the little pool. Um, you can use that as fertilizer in your garden. And what I do is I’ll just get a little bucket and I’ll just scoop it out of the little pool and I don’t dump it on the leaves. I’ll just dump it on the earth, you know, the ground by the plant. And it’s almost like fertilizer T to all the plants in the garden. So that part works really well too. And your garden will just be fewer bugs and fertilized and you’ll just have a really good garden.
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