You don’t have a house an pen for them?
It was perhaps very silly to get the ducks before we had the duck house built, but we did. We've been keeping them in an ever-expanding enclosure on the front porch (with a wet area and a dry area) that technically (according to the "how much space does a duck need" at various ages) should have been big enough, but it's obviously not.
But the get-the-farmhouse ready for the tenant projects (three solid weeks of building/rebuilding) are finally done, so the duck house is next.
But there is a big room in our shop building (dirt floor) that we're going to put them in in the interim. I'm blocking off a third of it (about 15 X 15 feet for the 10 ducklings), and we'll put fencing up for a large outdoor yard where the play water will be (we'll have drinking water inside). The only daytime predator issues we seem to have is hawks, and the yard will be well hidden under a couple of really huge willow trees, with the side of the shop building on one side, which will hopefully discourage hawk activity, and we'll put them inside at night. We also have a LGD, who came with the farm, who does a good job keeping everything else away. The room is very well insulated and cool (unlike, uh, the outdoors right now), and there is no predator access (concrete foundation walls, metal siding, high windows, which I'll probably put wire over even though I can't imagine a raccoon climbing up the smooth metal side of the building. So this hopefully will work for the next couple weeks until the real duck house and run is built.
The plan is for them to do some targeted free-ranging once they're full size.
