First time Ducky Daddy

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Tonight we let the 11-day old ducklings swim in the bathtub for the first time. They had a ball! They chased each other all around the tub, splashed water everywhere, and of course, pooped. They even dived under the water, to my surprise.










 
My favorite ducky swimming is that submarining they do. :love

Buy a buck's worth of live minnows for their next tub swim. That will be the most fun of any price you might spend for anything else. Trust me!
 
make the bath deeper ducklings love play tag by diving and popping up under their buddies. they can move quick under water
 
Yesterday, I converted the kennel into a plus-sized brooder. My ducklings are growing so fast they were outgrowing the plastic tub brooder I'd been using. Here is a picture of one of the girls (Holly, I think) looking out of the old brooder, look how tall they've gotten.


So using ideas gleaned from this forum, and a lot of really helpful suggestions that were given to me in this thread, I took this empty kennel and re-invented it as a duckling brooder/fortress. I use the word "fortress", because one its primary purposes is to protect the ducklings from my cats. My other main design goal was to try to minimize the potential mess, and try to keep as close to 100% of the mess as possible contained within the kennel walls, in order to reduce the posiblility of my wife nixing the whole indoor brooder thing.

I started with this empty kennel. It's exactly 4' wide, 30" deep, and 30" tall.


That plastic looking stuff on the top is transparent contact paper, sticky side up, which keeps the kitties from climbing around on top.

The first thing I did was wrap 24" wide 1/2" hardware cloth around the bottom outside of the kennel, to keep the cats from being able to mess with the ducklings. I used small plastic zip-ties to secure the hardware cloth to the kennel bars. This was the most time-consuming part of the whole operation. It was a bit of a pain, especially the 2 sides with the doors. However it was absolutely necessary, since I never want to experience coming home and discovering that one of my pets has killed (or eaten) one of my other pets. I considered just using cardboard instead of the hardware cloth, but with the cardboard it would have been harder for me to watch my duckies playing.

Next, I cut from plastic from a roll of plastic drop cloth from the paint department at Walmart (cost: $3), and ran it on the floor underneath the kennel and 24" up the walls on the sides. This was done just out of an abundance of caution, in case the ducks managed to fling food or poo beyond the walls of the kennel.


After I moved the kennel into place on the plastic, I taped together 2-1/2 large puppy training pads (also from Walmart, $6 I think for a box of 50) into one large 4-1/2' x 3' rectangle, and used that to line the bottom and about 3" up the sides of the kennel. That way, the puppy pads will absorb any moisture that reaches them through the bedding. Then when I decide to do a full bedding change once a week or so, I can just roll up puppy pads, bedding and all, for easy removal. (Thanks MimiEggs for that great idea!)


Then I put 12" of cardboard on the inside of the kennel, to contain the bedding and hopefully all of the projectile poop the ducklings seem so fond of launching.


Next, I took a small 10 gal plastic storage tub I had lying around in the garage, and converted it to a feeding/watering station. I cut a 6" wide hole in the side for the ducklings to enter through, and made a 1" high shelf out of hardware cloth to hopefully isolate the ducklings from the spilled food and water.




I filled the kennel/brooder/fortress with about 3" of pine shavings, and put the feeding station with their food and water dishes in the corner. Here is the final product. I spent an embarrasingly long amount of time on this, especially considering that the ducklings will only be using it for at most another month before they move outside to their permanent home. But the ducklings seem happy, so that makes it worth it.








After 1 day, so far clean-up of the new and improved brooder has been as easy as I hoped. I just removed the entire plastic tub food/water station and dumped out the spilled water that had collected in the bottom. For the rest of the brooder, I donned a disposable rubber glove ($3.50 for a box of 50 in the cleaning supplies section of Walmart - thanks again, MimiEggs!), removed the visible chunks of duck poo and surrounding pine shavings, stirred up the remaining shavings and added a few handfuls of new shavings, and wiped the occasional bit of projectile poop from the cardboard walls. Total clean up time was around 5 minutes, which is a huge improvement over the time it took me to clean the smaller plastic tub brooder.
 
OMG, it looks awesome, you did a great job! Glad I could be helpful.

One more thing (and this is just my opinion). When presented with something "new" a duck has "no hands" to pick it up and get a good inspection of the new object, so their only course of action is to pick it up in their mouth, roll it around, decide if it's good to eat (or not) and then spit it out. Hand something to an infant and they will do the same thing, lol. Therefore (my opinion) the smaller the object the greater the chance of an accidental swallowing. The last thing you want your ducklings to do is injest small shavings as they could clogg them up pretty severely. I use the larger pine shavings found at a feed store in the ginormous square bag (?) thing.

Also the shavings you find in Wal Mart for hamsters and that type of animal are more than likely "cedar shavings", DO NOT USE CEDAR SHAVINGS with your ducklings, it contains chemicals from the cedar tree, that can irritate their skin. Use ONLY pine shavings for ducklings.

Have fun with those babies dad, your doing great!
 

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