Baby chicks with baby ducks.. can this be done???

[ladybug99]

Last year I entered the wonderful world of chickens....became a chickie momma and now have 12 lovely full grown chickens!!! We currently have 29 eggs in the incubator and they are due to hatch on April 15th. My BF would like to add some ducks to our flock. We would like to keep the ducklings and chicks together so when they grow up they can all live together in the same enclosure. I have heard some conflicting information.. as to the feed situation... can someone help me out here. I have heard that the ducklings will die if I only feed them the chicken starter feed... and the chickens wont do well on the game feed... I had some one suggest mixing the two together and they will be just fine. Any suggestions from the experts???

I have seen by many of the photos here that ducks and chickens live fine together... Our local feed store keep them together as well.

We don't plan on mixing the new chicks with our older chickens. We are building a new coop and enclosure for them. We intend on having about a 60 x 50 foot penned in enclosure and our coop is an insulated box trailer. Will the ducks do alright in the coop with the chicks or do they need something else??
My BF had ducks and chickens when he was a kid and knows how to set up the swimming area for the ducks so the chickens won't drown. He said the ducks lived in an old dog house.

I am intrested in hearing from you all and I am very excited to get the ducklings.. but I want them to live long happy lives and I need to know the best way to care for them. BYC has been a wealth of knowlegde for me and I have some really beautiful healthy and happy chickens from the information I have gathered here, I hope to get the same amount of information for the ducklings as well.

 

[froggie71]

We love our ducks! And ducklings are soooo cute! We have raised ducklings with chicks. Warning. Even 1 duckling with chicks is very very messy. Ducklings know how to get water everywhere quickly and can drench the bedding as well as the chicks. That being said if you don't mind the mess they can be raised together successfully. We did learn to take both food and water away at night after a week. This kept the mess down and avoided the danger of them being soaked and chilled overnight. I've heard lots of opinions on this, but this is what we did. Good luck with whatever you do.
Ducklings can eat medicated chick starter without incident. We started with non-medicated feed with our 1st ducklings, but with the ones that were mixed with chicks we didn't bother and they all survived and are now 1-2 years old.

We do house our older birds seperately just because of our shear number of birds, but they all free range together without incident.

 

[julie75]

I do not considered myself an expert by no means because their is always something to learn. But my ducks and chickens have always shared a space and they do just fine. When they were both babies I fed them unmedicated chic starter food so there wouldn't be any mix up with food. Now I have separate feeders-one for the ducks with duck food/flock raiser and another for the chickens. They learn their boundaries with each other pretty early on. Please keep in mind that my babies free range all day and share a sleeping space at night. My ducks sleep on a pile of hay on the floor under the nest boxes and usually my chickens are perched on their roosts at night. They are actually so attached that they seems lost without each other-they even forage together!