Hi.
This is all very helpful info! Thank you!
You are welcome!
As of right now, all are fine in their own separate spaces so we will aim for a month before trying to integrate.
If your ducks - especially your
drakes - don't get along when you eventually put them together : what you can do is letting them freerange during the days at first, but keeping them separated during the nights - at least UNTIL they get
sufficiently along (so to be sure to not find a dead duck one morning).
► And since
it is coming soon :
during MATING SEASON, do ALWAYS keep a mean to separate very active drakes if ever you see them (over)mating too aggressively your girls, or worst : doing so to just ONE of the hens...
I don’t think they knowingly lied. They had rescued them from a poorly situation and just been watching them with their other animals for the time being and saw my post looking for some.
That's... actually VERY kind of them...!
Especially given the fact that ducks are not the easiest animals to raise when you don't know a thing about them...
...You know, since there are specific rules - like :
• never let ducks have access to their food if they don't have water to drink too;
• always use a waterer big enough for the ducks to be able to plunge their entire head - or, at the very leat, their
nares;
• don't feed them too much corn, so to keep them healthy;
• don't use hay as a bedding for the ducks
pretty please, so to reduce the risks of them (or
you) dying from Aspergillosis...
Small things, but that people won't automatically think about IF raising ducks were
not intended at first...
They admitted they didn’t know much about ducks so I assume they couldn’t sex them well. They just knew they were getting eggs so they had to have some females.
Huh... so, they
had to be pretty stressed about it...?
(At least, they had nutritious eggs to eat!)
What
I would assume is that
you have to be their saviour here;
ah, ah, ah!
I presume it is the khakis laying because the other breeds to my knowledge generally don’t lay in colder weather.
I don't know... could, in fact, be the Runner...?
My Khaki Campbell hen has stopped laying
just some weeks ago...
...however, some of my young Indian Runners have already started laying - one of them having even laid her first egg around Christmas!
Besides :
if Runner hens start laying during (or before) the Fall of their year of birth, they typically do keep laying through the following Winter.
I also assume they weren’t on the best feed either because when we first got them, their eggs were smaller than our chickens’ eggs! Within a week of being on our duck food, their eggs were significantly larger. I think it was just all around lack of knowledge because they were chicken breeders who really didn’t want ducks to begin with.
This image is first egg to 4 or 5 days later after swapping to our food.
No : I honestly think the reason why the eggs are bigger now than before is because the smaller eggs were the first ones that the hen laid.
Which is normal : similar to chickens, the first eggs that a duck lays are always smaller.
(They get bigger and bigger by the days - and in
some case, they even actually take
months to get to their optimal size.)
