how to keep the ducks alive during winter

[voodoozombie]

Sorry to hear that! do you not have a barn/coop? i cannot imagine keeping mine in the house.

I have a barn, but it's not secure enough for my liking. We have a giant basement with a one car garage (boat door), so they're kind of secluded. It's working out well, if not a little messy!

 

[Lund Poultry]

we are in Wisconsin so have almost the same temps as you have in Minnesota. Our ducks and geese are outside all year! You just have to be smart about it. We supply 3 sided sheds with deep straw badding. This keeps the sleet/snow and wind off of them and they can come and go as they please. We give water outside ONLY and have no heat lamp of any kind. Clean/Dry/NO drafts, but well veltilated is all they need. I would not keep them in a Tub or a dog crate for the winter. If you have a dog kennel outside just put a top notch dog house with a hole large enough for them to get in and out and make sure it faces south and not north or north west and they should be fine.

 

[pekinsRus]

Chain link dog kennel, with added roof, tarps, bungies, zip ties, equine pellets, wood shavings, 2 barn stall mats(man are they heavy), fresh food,water, veggies, toys( soft car dice & tie a bell on them) sunshine without the wind chill if possible, lots of love & snogging!!

 

[Sonny42408]

Quote:
Zero degrees F is when I start to get concerned, although all of my ducks molted recently are well feathered out now. I am in Western Kentucky and luckily we had a very mild winter last year & no extreme measures were needed to care for them. They have a coop they can use and have used for hatching their clutches out last spring & summer, but most of the time, they prefer to hide under it. With most of them roosting directly on the ground with a few sentinels that roost atop the Gate Post frame. It also seems that someone is selected to keep the Water Bowl free of ice, as their water bowl is the only one in the yard that has available water when I check on them in the morning, with only ice accumlating around the edges. Yeserday morning I did see one duck nibbling around the edges but not eating ay of the ice. Once they are let ot of their pen, some head over to their pools, they peck around the edges of their pools until they open up hole, then they will get in it and eat at the rest of the ice until they clear it out. So to make a long story shorter, my Muscovy Ducks don't seem to mind cold weather and have a game plan all their own to deal with it. But they will nap in the Heated Garage when the door is open, not because they are cold, but because they don't want to be left out and want to keep an eye on the Feed totes to make sure that none of the Turkeys or Chickens are getting anyting extra behind their backs! Plus I have one Hen who I promised to build a special coop for and she is in there to make sure I don't forget our deal! ( I Made 6 new nest boxes by stacking firewood in the carport, but after checking them all out, went over to the Plywood, Hissing and Cooing while shaking her tail feathers, telling me she wants a New Coop made out of plywood and that she wants it painted as well!!!)

 

[Marylynne]

Thank you for the wonderful question and information supplied by all of you. The wind chill is -35 here today. My 2 Swedish ducks are literally shivering in the cold despite my attempts to winterize. Your suggestions were priceless. Thank you!

 

[sunnyfishy]

We're having that crazy cold weather here in NH, especially this week, with temps at -20 F at night (windchill to -40), and this is my second winter with the ducks, but only the first with their new shelter. The new shelter most certainly is warmer or at least more shielded from wind, and it's smaller with more birds (they have plenty of space, but we had a ridiculous greenhouse setup last winter which wasn't great).

Has anyone had problems with blue swedes or mallards in these temps? My pekins and anconas seem unperturbed by the cold and will go out during the day if we let them (we don't generally let them out if it's below 15 F because it's generally very windy here), but I notice that our little swede and mallard really don't want to be out, nor do the two chickens we have.

 

[WVMHP]

We live at 9,200ft elevation and it gets very cold here, particularly at night. My Silver Appleyards choose to sleep out in the open until it gets below 0F at which point most of them sleep inside an extra-large doggy igloo located in a predator-proof pen. Often a single sentinel drake will still sleep outside the door of the igloo in the cold. We have a 200-watt bucket heater inside a 15-gal rubber tub for their water. My Muscovy are smarter and choose to sleep inside on the floor of the chicken coop which stays heated to around 20F.

I have mainly Icelandic and Hedemora chickens. My Hedemora tend to forage and venture out in the snow more and later in the colder part of the day than my other breeds.

 

[WannaBquack]

We house our ducks and geese in a one car garage with a roll up door that is lined with straw bales 3 high all the way around and 4 high in the doorway.

We stopped putting water in with them at night due to the mess and they do just fine. Outside, we have a small round pond insert about 2 feet across that is refilled several times a day. It is next to a frost free water hydrant so there is always water flow.

We get a lot of sub zero nights and well below freezing days and last year, didn't use heat lamps at all. We did make sure to make paths in the yard for them in the snow with the snow blower so they had someplace to run around.

Because the days are so short in winter, we keep a low wattage light on in the garage for them.

Do they move to the garage for winter or year round? And when you speak of the hay bales, do you mean that acts as their “fence”? If so do they make a mess of it or chew/dig through?
Thanks!

 

[WannaBquack]

Proper shelter, is the key! I live in Canada so we get cold and our winters are long, we can get our first snow as early as Thanksgiving(which is in October)

I do not have an insulated barn, just well vented and not drafty, i increase the bedding, added straw and ensured the birds have free access to it. Water is open by means of heated buckets, feed is kept dry by storing it out of the way of snow and ice/sleet, you also switch up the diet to replace what is lost from lack of foraging.

Usually the first winter is the worst, you'll have to learn what will work for your climate/ducks but you can get through it, all mine did lol They actually liked the snow for the most part.

Could you post a pic or link to the heated buckets you use? I’m considering a few ducks and I too am in Canada. The winter is my only hold-back.

 

[Bvictor]

For water-heating I made a plan, I dare to link it here too:

For heating I plan to make a beer-can solar heater that I can put on top of their coop, ventilated by computer-fans.
A separator "wall" will be installed to reduce "splashdamage" caused by the drinking water to the much deeper layer of straw they have in warm season. Also the water will be put on a box with multiple holes, I really do not want to be the straw wet around the waterbasin. I bought lots of straw for this winter and I will use it amply in their yard too.

Aaaaand: dry sauna! Ok, not the real thing but basically the same idea: in the house we heat with wood, and the iron fireplace has a closed top where I will but basalt stones, heat them up for the night. I put those stones in a metal lined wood box (all sides closed, big enough for a duck to rest on top of it) which I put in the coop.
The hotbox emits heat, but it is not warm enough to light up straw.

A hot bath is not easy to manage (and it is drinking water heated up, not cheap), but I will manage to move hot water out to their pond with a pump and hose, just to see them playing in the steam.

For afterbath preening only they will have an infra lamp, but I do not plan to run it 0-24.

Mine went and swam this morning and it was 19 degrees in Wyoming here. They have a metal tub buried in the ground to swim in and I have a driver that keeps the water above freezing. They have ground level shelter blocked from wind on all sides except east and lots of pine shavings for warmth.