Intro: This past summer, we had a devastating mink attack, which occurred during broad daylight while we were nearby. Once we intervened, the mink persisted trying to get the ducks even with us there. We were very fortunate to only lose one duck (Sweet Eloise, our recently adopted 8-year old runner), but it was six weeks of nursing the rest of the flock back to health with daily meds, wound cleaning, etc. As a result, we've been rethinking our whole husbandry protocol here at Three Bird Farm, and two duck tractors are a big part of our plans moving forward, especially as the flock is growing in size next month. We hope the following helps some other duck owners who may be considering something similar.
Background: At present we work with silver Appleyard ducks, which are a heritage breed on the Livestock Conservancy's Watch List. We live in Maine on about four acres relatively close to the coast. Prior to the mink attack, our daily protocol with the ducks was an hour of supervised free ranging in the morning and an hour of supervised free ranging in the evening. During the middle of the day, they were turned out in two fenced fields (split rail with rabbit fence) around their duckhouse, where they had plenty of cover from shrubs and several small structures. This worked well for over eight years with just one aerial attack (duck survived) in that time. We felt it was a good balance between protecting our flock from predators and letting our ducks forage and do normal duck stuff. At night, they were locked into their predator proof run, where they had 24/7 access to their duckhouse. As mentioned above, the mink attack happened midday, while the ducks were turned out in their fields. We were unable to catch the mink, and upon reflection, we decided we were unwilling to risk another similar attack, so the ducks have been locked up in their run during the days.
Plan: Moving forward, we decided to add additional run space, and we're building a 16'x8' aluminum frame run that will be adjacent to our current 16'x8' run (more on that elsewhere). In addition, we decided that a couple tractors are a good compromise that will keep the ducks relatively safe from predators but also allow them to forage on fresh pasture around the property. One of the tractors will also serve as a temporary duckhouse for our new ducks arriving next month. After doing a lot of research here and elsewhere, we decided on the Suscovich tractor and purchased the PDF ($10) of John Suscovich's book "Stress-Free Chicken Tractor Plans" (2nd edition) from Farm Marketing Solutions. We chose this design because a lot of people we know have used and liked it, we felt we could easily make some modifications that would make it serve our purposes best (like shedding snow, temporary duckhouse, etc.), and the ducks that we are bringing onto our farm next month have been living in one, so that should ease their transition.
Execution: We started by obtaining all the lumber and making all the cuts. We chose to use PT lumber after many, many discussions. All went according to plan except for one glaring error in the plans. On page 36, the plans galled for cutting parts F & G, which included two sections of 2"x4" (Part G) that are supposed to be 1' 8 3/8" long. As far as we could tell, this dimension is incorrect and both pieces should actually be 1' 9 3/8" long. When I looked it up online, we saw that others had noted this error, and at least one source said it had been revised in the plans. It was NOT revised in the plans we purchased online in September 2025--so be warned.
I won't spend a lot of time on the construction of the base except to say that the plans generally served us well, and there are a ton of YouTube videos out there if you need/want additional help.
We did run into trouble when we transitioned to working with the conduit for the roof, so let me explain what problems we had and what we ended up doing to solve them.
The diagram on page 42 of the plans suggests the width between the two ends of the bent conduit should be 6'.
Once complete, the width of our tractor base was only 5'10". We had lots of discussions about interior and exterior measurements, but the bottom line was that bending the conduit as laid out in the plans did not work for us. So we pulled out some high school geometry and figured that making our 45' angle bends 10.5" from the ends of the conduit (instead of 5") would work perfectly. This meant that the bent conduit was the proper width, even though the bends were higher than in *most* of the illustrations in the book. I say *most* because you will note this one illustration on page on page 34 shows the 45-degree bends higher than the other illustrations, as well as the descriptions, in the book. Hmmm.
In addition, we decided to cut our 10' conduit sections in half and join them with a 1/2" EMT Pull Elbow (instead of bending the 90-degree angle):
Our finished conduit sections therefore looked like this:
A couple other things I'll mention about bending conduit. We have a Klein Tools Conduit Bender and Angle Setter. For the 45-degree angle, you want to align your bend with the triangle (not the arrow or the star and no offset), which is labeled as "45-degree center-of-bend."
Then you bend until it stops because of the Angle Setter, which you've already put in the 45-degree angle position on the tool.
Easy peasy, but not explained in the plans, so we hope this helps someone. Here is the first of four pieces in place:
We also opted to use conduit straps (two for each attachment point) instead of screws to attach the conduit to the base.
Now remember how we said we attached our conduit pieces at the ridge with 1/2" EMT Pull Elbows? To us, the big advantage in doing that was how easy it makes it to attach the ridgepole using four more conduit straps like this:
So our finished assembly looks like this:
At this point, we needed to diverge from the plans to add our next big modification. We decided that with one of our two tractors, we were going to add a roof instead on the tarp described in the plans. Our plan was to add metal roofing, and so we needed to create a way to affix the roof panels. We opted for horizontal wood purlins. To keep the weight down but to also provide something beefy enough to screw into, we ripped 2"x4" in half and then notched them for the conduit.
We then attached each purlin to the conduit with a single screw, resulting in:
This is a good stopping point, but I'll continue with sharing our build in subsequent posts. Remember I said we were also building a new 16'x8" aluminum frame run? Well the aluminum just arrived, so I better get to that...
Background: At present we work with silver Appleyard ducks, which are a heritage breed on the Livestock Conservancy's Watch List. We live in Maine on about four acres relatively close to the coast. Prior to the mink attack, our daily protocol with the ducks was an hour of supervised free ranging in the morning and an hour of supervised free ranging in the evening. During the middle of the day, they were turned out in two fenced fields (split rail with rabbit fence) around their duckhouse, where they had plenty of cover from shrubs and several small structures. This worked well for over eight years with just one aerial attack (duck survived) in that time. We felt it was a good balance between protecting our flock from predators and letting our ducks forage and do normal duck stuff. At night, they were locked into their predator proof run, where they had 24/7 access to their duckhouse. As mentioned above, the mink attack happened midday, while the ducks were turned out in their fields. We were unable to catch the mink, and upon reflection, we decided we were unwilling to risk another similar attack, so the ducks have been locked up in their run during the days.
Plan: Moving forward, we decided to add additional run space, and we're building a 16'x8' aluminum frame run that will be adjacent to our current 16'x8' run (more on that elsewhere). In addition, we decided that a couple tractors are a good compromise that will keep the ducks relatively safe from predators but also allow them to forage on fresh pasture around the property. One of the tractors will also serve as a temporary duckhouse for our new ducks arriving next month. After doing a lot of research here and elsewhere, we decided on the Suscovich tractor and purchased the PDF ($10) of John Suscovich's book "Stress-Free Chicken Tractor Plans" (2nd edition) from Farm Marketing Solutions. We chose this design because a lot of people we know have used and liked it, we felt we could easily make some modifications that would make it serve our purposes best (like shedding snow, temporary duckhouse, etc.), and the ducks that we are bringing onto our farm next month have been living in one, so that should ease their transition.
Execution: We started by obtaining all the lumber and making all the cuts. We chose to use PT lumber after many, many discussions. All went according to plan except for one glaring error in the plans. On page 36, the plans galled for cutting parts F & G, which included two sections of 2"x4" (Part G) that are supposed to be 1' 8 3/8" long. As far as we could tell, this dimension is incorrect and both pieces should actually be 1' 9 3/8" long. When I looked it up online, we saw that others had noted this error, and at least one source said it had been revised in the plans. It was NOT revised in the plans we purchased online in September 2025--so be warned.
I won't spend a lot of time on the construction of the base except to say that the plans generally served us well, and there are a ton of YouTube videos out there if you need/want additional help.
We did run into trouble when we transitioned to working with the conduit for the roof, so let me explain what problems we had and what we ended up doing to solve them.
The diagram on page 42 of the plans suggests the width between the two ends of the bent conduit should be 6'.
Once complete, the width of our tractor base was only 5'10". We had lots of discussions about interior and exterior measurements, but the bottom line was that bending the conduit as laid out in the plans did not work for us. So we pulled out some high school geometry and figured that making our 45' angle bends 10.5" from the ends of the conduit (instead of 5") would work perfectly. This meant that the bent conduit was the proper width, even though the bends were higher than in *most* of the illustrations in the book. I say *most* because you will note this one illustration on page on page 34 shows the 45-degree bends higher than the other illustrations, as well as the descriptions, in the book. Hmmm.
In addition, we decided to cut our 10' conduit sections in half and join them with a 1/2" EMT Pull Elbow (instead of bending the 90-degree angle):
Our finished conduit sections therefore looked like this:
A couple other things I'll mention about bending conduit. We have a Klein Tools Conduit Bender and Angle Setter. For the 45-degree angle, you want to align your bend with the triangle (not the arrow or the star and no offset), which is labeled as "45-degree center-of-bend."
Then you bend until it stops because of the Angle Setter, which you've already put in the 45-degree angle position on the tool.
Easy peasy, but not explained in the plans, so we hope this helps someone. Here is the first of four pieces in place:
We also opted to use conduit straps (two for each attachment point) instead of screws to attach the conduit to the base.
Now remember how we said we attached our conduit pieces at the ridge with 1/2" EMT Pull Elbows? To us, the big advantage in doing that was how easy it makes it to attach the ridgepole using four more conduit straps like this:
So our finished assembly looks like this:
At this point, we needed to diverge from the plans to add our next big modification. We decided that with one of our two tractors, we were going to add a roof instead on the tarp described in the plans. Our plan was to add metal roofing, and so we needed to create a way to affix the roof panels. We opted for horizontal wood purlins. To keep the weight down but to also provide something beefy enough to screw into, we ripped 2"x4" in half and then notched them for the conduit.
We then attached each purlin to the conduit with a single screw, resulting in:
This is a good stopping point, but I'll continue with sharing our build in subsequent posts. Remember I said we were also building a new 16'x8" aluminum frame run? Well the aluminum just arrived, so I better get to that...
