A new question about ducks.......food....water

[okiechick57]

Hey all you knowledgeable duck peeps

want to share with me what you feed your ducks, exactly..........and how you feed it to them.......someone recently told me that ducks love their food IN the water.......makes sense to me.......so I tried it..........of course.....it can't be crumbles.but whole food.....mine went nuts.....how come I havent seen this talked about on here? if you mix your ducks food yourself.please share what you put in it...as I am having a hard time finding a good balanced diet that they will eat ! Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Dodgegal79]

Depends on their age. If they are babies i soak the pellets or crumble and its make it easier for them to eat and less mess. If its dry they like to eat them run to the water bowl to wash it down. My adult I feed them a mixture flatted corn, flatted barley and oats, alfalfa pellets and fish food (pond fish food). You can buy pellets for the adult, you don't have to soak them then. My feed mix is about 70% flatted corn, 25 % oats/barley, 3% alfalfa and 2%fish food. I also throw some oyster shell in once and awhile. I had some of my muscoveys butchered that were on this diet and the inspector loved them. They had no fat and no parasite and were very very healthly. I was having problems with my Muscovys and read they eat small animals and lizards in the wild and thought that mine were missing the animal protien in their diet. All feed now has no animal by-products and you can't by fish meal or bone meal here now, so the closes thing I could find was this pond fish food. It has soy, fish all sorts of good things, and I haven't had any problems since I started mixing this feed. Sorry for being so long. Good luck with your little quacks.

 

[Fancy Feather Poultry]

Well new ducklings can only have so much water or they get water logged, and die
and you cant let them get wet because they dont have there oil glands yet. I just give mine straight up feed mines already crumbled. My old ducks used to just run back and fourth from feeder to waterer and eat they would muckie up the waterer with dirt though they would eat dirt then drink water?, idk why but they did.

 

[okiechick57]

thanks silkie...........these are not ducklings though........ thought it was just interesting.and I thought maybe they needed to be moved off of crumbles now that they are of mating age....

 

[Dodgegal79]

They need access to water 24/7. They need to be able to get their whole beak into the water so they can wash their nostrils out, or they will have problems. Don't let them swim too much, thats what Silkelovr means. If they swim you have to make sure they can get dry.

 

[DuckLady]

Ducks like to dabble in their water for food. I will float lettuce and Cheerios as treats. Mazuri makes a floating waterfowl feed. Otherwise you just end up with a nasty mess of a water dish if you use regular feed.

When mine were baby-babies, I used a shallow plate and flaoted lettuce on the water. They had a great time!

 

[Dodgegal79]

Oh Terrie they do love lettuce. I didn't know that but I have started to bring old produce home and I parked the truck and came back out to get the boxes out to feed them the goodies and three of them were at the back of the truck waiting. They could smell the lettuce. Buggers.

 

[tx_dane_mom]

Quote:
What a great idea! Never thought of that!
Kristi

 

[okiechick57]

I understand the need to rinse their nostrils......I was just wondering what you do feed your ducks...........crumbles? grains?seeds? and treats....... they have access to tons of water....only one runner seems to stay in longer than others........my Muscovies dont like the new feed I bought....so I am worried they are not eating enough..I have just stopped them from having access to the dry dog food,they ate so much my dogs were getting thin...........

 

[MandyH]

We have three kittens and their food bowl is on my front porch. Well these kittens were going through awful amounts of food and they weren't fat or anything. Well one morning I hear a tap tap tap on my living room window and low and behold there were the muscovies standing there on top of the deck box on the porch tapping on the window. I went out to see what the heck and I guess they saw me walking through the living room and were tapping on the window so I would come fill up the kitten bowl!!!! They had eaten it all and wanted more. Poor cats I don't even know if they were gettiing any LOL. Anyway all the other ducks stay on the pond in the pasture and I never thought about those scoundrels eating it. I sold them this weekend because they were too big a pain in the butt.