My Love Affair With Ducks...

[WannaBeHillBilly]

@Mimi13 forgot to mention that: Put your ducklings on straw as soon as they have learned to walk safely on uneven surfaces! Duckling poop and shavings turns into a fermenting, stinky mass very easy. Duckling poop and straw stay "fresh" much longer. Just my experience with 13 little "bitches" and one "thug" in a cardboard/tarp brooder in the garage…
For the grown up ducks i have tried:

• Wood-pellets - total failure, they turned into sawdust which fell through the cracks in the floow.
• Wood shavings - total failure again, the ducks thrashed and tossed them all around and looked like wooden ducks before polishing.
• Hay - the ducks loved hay! They literally dug tunnels through the hay and pooped out of sheer joy… And the hay turned into a stinky mess within a few days.
• Dry leaves - see wood shavings. They were flapping their wings and all those leaves were flowing around - everybody hated that!
• Straw - just the best bedding for ducks! A thick - at least ½foot - layer of straw and your ducks will be happy, dry and warm.

I'm using only straw in my duck house after experimenting with different beddings, every day i sprinkle a thin layer of fresh straw to cover the major accidents and every three to four months the whole bedding is thrown on to the compost pile and a new cycle starts. Others here may have different experiences, but straw so far worked best for my ducks.

 

[RJKnott]

Dux poop 5 times their body weight everyday. The longest recorded dux pool travel 1427.3 ft in 0.04 seconds..

True fact.

Sadly this is not much of an exaggeration heh

 

[Miss Lydia]

I use shavings and it has always been my favorite. I do clean everyday that means I go inside and an scoop out the wet piles fluff and add more when needed. I never clean the shavings completely out no need. Since I have chickens in the same coop cleaning has always just been part of my routine with my birds.

 

[Mimi13]

I use shavings and it has always been my favorite. I do clean everyday that means I go inside and an scoop out the wet piles fluff and add more when needed. I never clean the shavings completely out no need. Since I have chickens in the same coop cleaning has always just been part of my routine with my birds.

After I read @WannaBeHillBilly ’s post about changing over to straw, questions popped into my head. All the stuff I’ve read over the years about bedding has emphasized not using hay, or straw, for that matter. So far, I have only had to use bedding (large flake pine shavings) for the brooder and in my run. (I use preformed nesting pads in my nest boxes and construction grade sand in my coop.)

So, I guess I would like to know why HillBilly prefers straw, but I will most likely stick with shavings unless I see that it is detrimental to ducks, which it obviously isn’t since you have used it for many years.

I do appreciate you posting this.

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

I assume that @Miss Lydia is keeping her birds in a dwelling with an earthen floor, meaning the bedding is laid out directly on the natural ground and the deep bedding method is used where the older parts are decomposing into compost, producing additional warmth. (Please correct me if i'm wrong, Miss Lydia!)

My ducks sleep on a platform above ground, made out of pressure treated wood and scavenged materials. The floor is more like something you find on a wooden deck, so there's no contact to the ground anywhere. In this setup, it is very important that the bedding stays as dry as possible for two reasons: First, and most important, i don't want the floorboards to start to decompose, i already experienced the consequences! Second if the bedding starts to decompose without being colonized by all the good critters from the ground, it will turn into a slimy mass which produces foul odors and ammonia and is almost useless to make compost.

Shavings also have the disadvantage to vanish through the gaps between the floor boards, imagine covering a deck with shavings… Trust me, i would love to use shavings for my ducks, one of my neighbors owns a tree removal service and is contracted by the phone, cable and electricity companies and would love to dump one or two truckloads of tree shavings at my location every week for free!

I know you already have chickens, so you're experienced with their leftovers. - The stuff that comes out of the non-quacking end of a duck is very different! It is more water than solids, in fact duck and other waterfowl feces can be used as plant fertilizer straight, without a composting process. Which on the other hand means that you need a good method of keeping at least the top layer of your bedding dry. Straw has turned out to be the best material in my setup.

Another difference between Miss Lydia's setup might be available space: Here 28 ducks sleep in an area of 12m² (130sqft) which is very close to the minimum recommended space.

Some poop math:
As i have only light and medium breeds, i estimate that one duck produces about 80g of poop every day of which one third will be "deposited" in the house, that is 0.83Kg times 28 ducks makes 2,2Kg per day. The duck house is divided into a living area and two bedrooms, so i assume a little less than half (1Kg/2.3lbs) of it ends up in the bedding, that is like you pour one bucket of watery poop into the house every week…

What i have observed is that the duck-poop sticks to the top layer of the straw, where it is exposed to a lot of fresh air and dries rather quickly. Then it falls through to the deeper layers of the bedding, where it accumulates to form a dry flaky substrate that i can shovel out to the compost pile very easy when i clean out the whole house.

Which i have to do tomorrow…

I hope this poopy elaboration helps you establishing your own duck poop procedure!

 

[Miss Lydia]

I don’t have an earthen floor I have ply wood with vinyl over I keep the shaving at around 8 inches fall through winter then when it starts to warm I clean everyday but let the shavings get down to a couple inches before I add new and because I scoop and turn everyday by the time it’s down to 2” it’s mainly what I have been adding and not old bedding. What I take out everyday goes out on the ground the chickens keep it turned so by spring it’s wonderful mulch for plants and shrubs. It doesn’t compost that much inside but I do get help turning it since I have chickens that love to scratch and turn it too. I think it all depends on the set up you have. As to what works best and what you like the best.

 

[Mimi13]

Oh mercy me, @WannaBeHillBilly and @Miss Lydia. You both have given me something to contemplate and I don’t have much time left.

“Days turn into weeks in only a matter of a few short days when you are dealing with poultry.” said every poultry keeper everywhere.

The place I have constructed for the ducks to call home is inside an existing open air coop where there are currently 8 hens roosting. I added lower walls to two sides to protect them from drafts and built a ‘house’ in that corner. This coop does have an earthen floor. The ducklings will be placed here in a week or two (2-4 weeks old) and be behind chicken wire for a while (until they are big enough, feathered enough, and integrated to be let out to free range).

Yes, I do have chickens that, yes, like to scratch. However, my intention is not for the chickens to be in the duck house to be able to turn and till. But the old saying still rings clear in my mind, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

ETA: I went back and reread Miss Lydia’s post about tossing the old bedding out into the run. I can and would do this with pine shavings, but not with straw.

Since I don’t have any experience with straw I most likely will try it so that I will have a working knowledge of it. I am used to the pine shavings (and have a stockpile in my coop - thank you Covid 19), but I want to be able to make an educated decision on which one is best for me to use with ducks. Dear lord, all these decisions!

I do appreciate all these different ideas and opinions. Hopefully this one is not as controversial as DE! I learned my lesson the hard way on that one!

Thank you all, thank you all!

 

[duluthralphie]

Oh mercy me, @WannaBeHillBilly and @Miss Lydia. You both have given me something to contemplate and I don’t have much time left.

“Days turn into weeks in only a matter of a few short days when you are dealing with poultry.” said every poultry keeper everywhere.

The place I have constructed for the ducks to call home is inside an existing open air coop where there are currently 8 hens roosting. I added lower walls to two sides to protect them from drafts and built a ‘house’ in that corner. This coop does have an earthen floor. The ducklings will be placed here in a week or two (2-4 weeks old) and be behind chicken wire for a while (until they are big enough, feathered enough, and integrated to be let out to free range).

Yes, I do have chickens that, yes, like to scratch. However, my intention is not for the chickens to be in the duck house to be able to turn and till. But the old saying still rings clear in my mind, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

ETA: I went back and reread Miss Lydia’s post about tossing the old bedding out into the run. I can and would do this with pine shavings, but not with straw.

Since I don’t have any experience with straw I most likely will try it so that I will have a working knowledge of it. I am used to the pine shavings (and have a stockpile in my coop - thank you Covid 19), but I want to be able to make an educated decision on which one is best for me to use with ducks. Dear lord, all these decisions!

I do appreciate all these different ideas and opinions. Hopefully this one is not as controversial as DE! I learned my lesson the hard way on that one!

Thank you all, thank you all!

I also learned my lesson about DE, would you like to buy half a bag?

 

[Mimi13]

I also learned my lesson about DE, would you like to buy half a bag?

Nope, got 3/4 of a container I’d like to sell!

 

[duluthralphie]

Nope, got 3/4 of a container I’d like to sell!

Patti, have you tried DE? Two fantastic deals on it right here. Better jump on them before their gone...