1900 Gallons of ducky bliss

[lovemy mallards]

Today was the first clean. We pumped out the whole thing because: 1. It is difficult to guide the poop to the pump - mostly you just stir it up. 2. We tried feeding them peas and half of 4 lbs of peas we fed them over the week were in the bottom of the pool. Apparently it is too deep for them to want to pick the peas off the bottom. No more peas in the pool (can't wait to try goldfish when it is warmer though... In the past the fish didn't have a chance and were gone in an instant... in this pool, I think the ducks may have to work for their food ) If it wasn't for the peas, it could have probably gone a second week. The water was obviously not drinking water (for me anyway) after 5 minutes and didn't get that much worse over the course of the week: by day 3 you couldn't actually see the bottom, but you are looking through 2-1/2 feet of water at a dull brown floor. Coming out of the hose the water looked clear which is much better than I can say for the kiddie pools I pumped. The droppings on the bottom were about a 50% covering at maybe 1/8". It took about 3 hours to pump it down to about 200 gallons which is where our current sump pump starts sucking air. This was through a garden hose which worked fine for the large kiddie pools, but we might get a bigger hose later to speed it up. Doesn't really matter. I turned on the pump in the morning and we went out to eat and did a little shopping got back did a couple other chores and it was done. It took about another hour with the shop vac to vacuum out all the peas and most of the poop. There was almost no OTP in the pool other than the junk we threw in. There is another pump at our feed store that will pump down to 3/8" of water and I think that might work better if we follow a strict policy of not throwing non-floating food to the ducks. The pool took 4 hours 22 minutes to fill (again with the garden hose) This probably won't change, but knowing the time, we can just set an alarm for say 4 hours and otherwise ignore it. At around 4 hours, the water is touching the bottom of the ramp, so I took the obstacles off the ramp so the ducks could go back in while the last couple hundred gallons were still filling. They had been in kind of a funk all day because now they knew what the big blue thing was and were deprived of it for 8 hours. Here is a clip from a few minutes after the ramp was open to the ducks. I apologize in advance for Kaine, he has only one thing on his mind... So at this point, I would say doing a pool change took about an hour of our time actively and we can probably get that down to 20 minutes if we don't throw peas in the pool. The pool was out of commission about 8 hours and that can probably be reduced to 5-6 hours (pump side will get shorter but fill side won't). This replaces about 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes in the evening every day that we spend with the kiddie pools so 70 minutes / week. So far it really isn't that much more work total and it is much more fun to watch the duckies when they can dive and go nuts. We will see how it goes when it is warm enough to possible have algae problems.

How long can a female be held under water? I worry my male will drown her

 

[Tevyes Dad]

@lovemy mallards You put a few questions in ovations, so I will try to answer them here:

How long can a female be held under water without it hurting her?

Ducks can hold their breaths about as long as a person can from what I have read, but they can get a breath very fast when they surface. Since the female can rock the boat so to speak, I doubt on open water one duck can drown another even with a large size difference. But in shallow water a heavy duck can maybe hold down a much smaller duck and multiple ducks ganging up on 1 duck can definitely cause problems.

I am more concerned with my kiddie pools than the big one because the duck on the bottom can be pressed on the bottom of the pool - in deeper water, she can always rock back and catch a breath unless multiple ducks hold her in place.

How small do you cut the cucumbers?

For the most part, we don't. We either just break them in half or cut them into spears, then hold on to them so the ducks nibble off bite sized pieces themselves. They have duck food available all the time, but we "bring" them the treats and hand feed just about everything but watermelon. That way they always love seeing us

How well do they do in the snow? And how often do you give mealworms?

Snow is no problem at all. They have a straw patch available to them near their house where they can stay if they want to be outside but out of the snow and when it is REALLY cold, they pretty much stay on it, but otherwise they just go where they like.

I am ashamed to say it, they get meal worms almost every day. It is probably a bit much, but they love them so much! We have 12 ducks and go through about 88 lbs of dried meal worms per year (I buy them 44 lbs at a time). They get more in the winter when it is their primary treat after romaine lettuce. In the Spring/Summer/Fall, they get more watermelon, butter lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, gold fish and of course they still get romaine and fewer meal worms (but still almost every day).

 

[lovemy mallards]

@lovemy mallards You put a few questions in ovations, so I will try to answer them here:
Ducks can hold their breaths about as long as a person can from what I have read, but they can get a breath very fast when they surface. Since the female can rock the boat so to speak, I doubt on open water one duck can drown another even with a large size difference. But in shallow water a heavy duck can maybe hold down a much smaller duck and multiple ducks ganging up on 1 duck can definitely cause problems.

I am more concerned with my kiddie pools than the big one because the duck on the bottom can be pressed on the bottom of the pool - in deeper water, she can always rock back and catch a breath unless multiple ducks hold her in place.
For the most part, we don't. We either just break them in half or cut them into spears, then hold on to them so the ducks nibble off bite sized pieces themselves. They have duck food available all the time, but we "bring" them the treats and hand feed just about everything but watermelon. That way they always love seeing us
Snow is no problem at all. They have a straw patch available to them near their house where they can stay if they want to be outside but out of the snow and when it is REALLY cold, they pretty much stay on it, but otherwise they just go where they like.

I am ashamed to say it, they get meal worms almost every day. It is probably a bit much, but they love them so much! We have 12 ducks and go through about 88 lbs of dried meal worms per year (I buy them 44 lbs at a time). They get more in the winter when it is their primary treat after romaine lettuce. In the Spring/Summer/Fall, they get more watermelon, butter lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, gold fish and of course they still get romaine and fewer meal worms (but still almost every day).

Can they eat watermelon? I worry about the seeds

 

[needlessjunk]

@lovemy mallards You put a few questions in ovations, so I will try to answer them here:
Ducks can hold their breaths about as long as a person can from what I have read, but they can get a breath very fast when they surface. Since the female can rock the boat so to speak, I doubt on open water one duck can drown another even with a large size difference. But in shallow water a heavy duck can maybe hold down a much smaller duck and multiple ducks ganging up on 1 duck can definitely cause problems.

I am more concerned with my kiddie pools than the big one because the duck on the bottom can be pressed on the bottom of the pool - in deeper water, she can always rock back and catch a breath unless multiple ducks hold her in place.
For the most part, we don't. We either just break them in half or cut them into spears, then hold on to them so the ducks nibble off bite sized pieces themselves. They have duck food available all the time, but we "bring" them the treats and hand feed just about everything but watermelon. That way they always love seeing us
Snow is no problem at all. They have a straw patch available to them near their house where they can stay if they want to be outside but out of the snow and when it is REALLY cold, they pretty much stay on it, but otherwise they just go where they like.

I am ashamed to say it, they get meal worms almost every day. It is probably a bit much, but they love them so much! We have 12 ducks and go through about 88 lbs of dried meal worms per year (I buy them 44 lbs at a time). They get more in the winter when it is their primary treat after romaine lettuce. In the Spring/Summer/Fall, they get more watermelon, butter lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, gold fish and of course they still get romaine and fewer meal worms (but still almost every day).

Can they eat watermelon? I worry about the seeds

Oh man! Yes, watermelon is totally okay and one of the best ones to watch them eat. The seeds are just fine for them.

 

[Tevyes Dad]

Oh man! Yes, watermelon is totally okay and one of the best ones to watch them eat. The seeds are just fine for them.

The seeds are actually the healthiest part of the watermelon from what I have read. The only seeds I know of off the top of my head as bad are apple seeds. I also recently gave them cantaloupe and honeydew (both with the seeds intact) and they loved them. They were hesitant about the cantaloupe (I think because it is orange and they don't like many orange things), but they plowed into the honeydew right from the beginning. I haven't seen any bad reactions so those seeds should be OK too. But I have to agree with @needlesjunk watermelon is the best. Especially if you have a duck with white on them (Swedish, F&W runner, Pekin) they turn totally pink! The only thing that comes close to watermelon is a whole tomato given to the flock. They play football running around the yard trying to get a second to rip off a piece of flesh while the other ducks try to steal it.

 

[Tevyes Dad]

Woohoo! Yesterday we put the pool back up. Less work for us... More fun for the ducks! Win-win. It took less than 20 minutes to put it up so we did alright packing it. The ducks were very appreciative. And to those who have said ducks don't do well with ramps, put a big pool at the end of the ramp and they will walk up and down it all day!

In fact Pocahontas didn't even wait for me to put the ramp up to the pool... or finish putting it back together for that matter...


(I had just stepped away for a couple seconds to turn off the water because the pool was full.)

I added a hard pump / drain for easier and faster draining. There is an access to the drain for the shopvac hose so we can pump out without having a long hose around...



The valve on the left breaks apart easily and there is a union just before it goes underground on the right. So I can pull the large span off easily and then there is only a short run down to the pump that screws on and off easily. Once the secure area is done, I will rebuild the ducky dome. For right now, there is no way the pool will get above 60 degrees.

Last year we found out that Noir had stopped swimming when we put in the big pool. I guess the lack of a bottom scared her. This year we got her swimming in the kiddie pools and she still didn't seem to like the bigger ones although she could touch bottom. Well when we opened the pool, we chased her down and threw her in the big pool. To our surprise, she swam around a bit and did some washing motions for a while before she decided to get out. She stayed in long enough (5 minutes or so), we let her have her head. Later in the evening, we were even more surprised when we saw her on the ramp....



And then she went in the pool all on her own.



This was great! She never had a problem with the ramp. We used to put her in the pool and she would bee-line it right for the ramp and run out. As a consequence her feathers were in really bad condition at the end of last summer because she never swam and didn't preen much (we didn't really notice until her feathers started getting bad.) So whatever problem she had with the big pool, she got over it. We will keep an eye on her and make sure this is true, but she seemed perfectly happy in the water yesterday.

 

[Tevyes Dad]

Well we did our first clean of the year this weekend. We got it down now! Less than 1/2 hour to drain. (29 minutes and I don't remember seconds). And very little shop vac time. After the pump is turned on for a couple seconds, I can shut it off and the pool will siphon out faster than the pump used to work. So with the pump running, I believe we are out-performing its specification. I just looked it up on Harbor Freight and it is rated at 2910 GPH we are actually getting about 3800 GPH!

 

[Wobbles]

Lucky ducks! I love the group photos in the giant pool. So fun.

We bought the smallest kiddie pool I have ever seen today. The thing is about half the size of the small ones they sell at walmart. It is adorable but it is just to last until we can get them a new bigger one. Louie actually got in and washed himself...I've never seen him in the water before and he was so shabby. All handsome and fluffy now!

 

[Tevyes Dad]

Lucky ducks! I love the group photos in the giant pool. So fun.

We bought the smallest kiddie pool I have ever seen today. The thing is about half the size of the small ones they sell at walmart. It is adorable but it is just to last until we can get them a new bigger one. Louie actually got in and washed himself...I've never seen him in the water before and he was so shabby. All handsome and fluffy now!

Did Louie have a bigger kiddie pool and just not go in, or did he just not have one available? If the former, he might have had a hard time with the stairs/ramp/jumping over the edge and maybe the small one makes it easier. I am glad his feathers are in better shape now.

 

[Tevyes Dad]

Some pics from last summer's goldfish feeds: Diving ducks everywhere!