Chickens and Ducks Together???...

[mandylovespets]

I am a new chicken owner... Well, currently I only have one chick, but would like to get a couple more, hopefully Buff Orpington's... I was wondering if chickens and ducks would do ok living with each other???... I have a Mallard duck and a Pekin duck and my yard isn't very big. So, I was wondering how they would behave with a couple of chickens. I plan on letting them roam around the yard during the day and of course the chickens would have a coop to stay in in the nighttime. Also, do you think the ducks will try to go into the coop, or even eat the chickens food?... Any suggestions on keeping chickens and ducks together would be greatly appreciated, for their sake and mine

!!!...

 

[ChickNLittle]

Keeping chickens with ducks on the same property is fine. I would not coop them up together of course because lets face it, chickens like dry, ducks like wet, and the ducks will definitely play in the chickens drinking water. And yes, ducks will and do eat the chicken feed. It would be best to feed the chickens in their pen. Anyway, the ducks will probably get chased away by the bigger chickens if they try to be around when they are eating. Good luck! I have two ducks and a bunch of chickens myself.

 

[mamaboyd]

I'm interested in this as well as my daughter wants to gets some ducks. My brother had ducks when he had chickens. He had a separate place for them at night time, but he said they got along with his chickens just fine. Depending on what kind of ducks you have, you may only need a small area that has water in it for them to swim in. I would think that ducks and chickens would be fine on the same property. Actually, my brother has been encouraging me to get some ducks much to my hubby's dismay, gee, what's a few more animals to feed!!

 

[mandylovespets]

That's what I was thinking... That they should be fine together, but I just want to make sure though. I have two ducklings and a chick together in a brooder box right now. they are all about 3 weeks old and they just love each other to death. They haven't tried picking on each other either (knock on wood!)...

 

[mamaboyd]

The ducks when they get bigger will eat different foods than the chickens, my brother fed his ducks mainly cracked corn instead of the chicken feed.

 

[MissPrissy]

I am not an advocate of mixing fowl. They do not live together in nature so I don't think they should be penned together as domestic fowl. Ducks are messy mess messy and wet. Chickens don't care for wet. Ducks also need a better diet than cracked corn. For all fowl corn is like candy. Each of them need their own feeds that meet their individual needs for protein and various trace minerals.

 

[legacyln]

I agree with Miss Prissy & ChickNLittle and will relate a little vignette from my childhood that I think illustrates why they don't mix well.

I had my first chickens as a kid. They were my pets and their care was my job. We only ever had 2 or 3 hens at a time (we lived in the suburbs). So one year when I was 10 or 11 my older brother's friend came over with several Easter chicks (I didn't know what the heck they were at the time but I now know they were a Black Austrolorp and 2 EEs) and 3 ducklings. Not knowing any better, we put them all together and I got a small swimming pool (5 ft across??) for the ducks. You'd clean and fill that swimming pool and 1 hour later it was the blackest, nastiest water you ever saw or smelled! The whole chicken run was always wet and nasty while we had the ducks, but of course not so when we only had chickens. So in time the ducks grew to adult size and bullied the hens mercilessly. Not only did they chase them around and keep them away from food just for kicks, the male ducks (we had 2 males, 1 female) appeared to be sexually assaulting the hens. Yes! I kid you not! Finally, in under 1 year, we decided we were done with ducks. We couldn't find a home for them, so my parents decided to take them to a local park and "let them go" with a big mixed flock of ?feral/wild? white ducks and mallards on a big pond. Don't know if they were able to survive there after being raised by us, and it is not what I'd do now as an animal owner if I needed to re-home an animal. But our hens were SOOOOOO glad they were gone. I see ducklings at the feed store now and am not even tempted, I will never forget regularly cleaning that filthy Smurfs swimming pool! Now if I had a pond.......

Now consider the source of this story, the reflections of a 10 year old whose parents didn't really ensure our animal husbandry skills were up to snuff, but I do think it shows that ducks and chickens don't mix. Good luck!

 

[mamaboyd]

I agree I wouldn't keep ducks in with chickens once they got past the baby stage. They are much much more messier than chickens are. My brother had a little hut for the ducks that was separate from the chickens, and he didn't keep them in the same run as the chickens. He did keep a little tub of water for them to swim in though, but he said it wasn't too bad to keep clean. When I said that he fed the ducks cracked corn, he did, but that is not all that he fed them , I just couldn't remember what else he said he did feed them as they have different requirements than chickens. It was late when I posted and I'm sorry if I left something out!!
Anyhow, if you have a separate area for your ducks you should still be fine with them when they get older, but I guess every duck is different and maybe it depends on the breed of the duck as to how it treats chickens?? I don't know, this is all new to me, but we are hoping to get a pair of ducks soon too.

 

[nightshade]

I have mine together, no problems at all. I have a built in tub pond in the run and the chickens seem to like it as much as the ducks. The ducks even have started hatching out the chicken eggs. It takes alittle extra work to keep a run clean, but if you are like me and paranoid about a smelling coop, you clean it once a week anyway. You may want to do a fourm search for this cause I know there are many on here that do keep them together with out any problems, and I am not sure why I am the only one that has said something.

 

[DuckLady]

I never brood mine together for the reasons above and that ducklings need a different feed than chicks. But when they are grown they are fine. They eat the same feed and I have several different water sources. The chickens hang with each other as do the ducks. If the drakes are mating the chickens, then you have too many drakes or not enough ducks.
And just as an FYI, it is now illegal these days in most places to dump domestic animals at a park, not to mention that their average lifespan is about 6 months. If they are babies, they will be eaten by predators or drowned by grown ducks or mated with and killed by other drakes. If they are older, unless someoine is going there and feeding properly and consistently, they will starve on the bread they get on weekends or will fall victim to dogs or wild predators. If they survive longer, it is luck.