New member - just always looking for advise and experience

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HappyChiksFarm

In the Brooder
Jun 25, 2024
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Hi my name is Jenn. We started our little flock family last spring with 12 chicks, 4 Pekin and no idea what we were doing. We are now at 40 chicken (crazy chicken math!) and 8 ducks (Pekin, khaki Campbell’s, and Swedish blues) I have been scrolling through this sight off and on for advice and info for a while and just decided to join.

While I feel like we are doing fine with our chickens, we seem to be struggling to figure out the ducks. We ended up with 2 males and 2 females out of the first 4 we bought. Learned quickly that this wasn’t a great ratio as the drakes were going after our chickens (1 specifically). So we grew the flock, crossing our fingers, since no way to know the sex when you buy at TSC. Things seemed to be going ok as the old and young blended well (snd they no longer bother the chickens) and we are working to expand their space but now it appears one of our little khaki females is being targeted by the dominate Pekin drake. He is tearing up the back of her head pretty bad. He grabs ahold and holds on as she tries to run to away. I have her isolated right now to heal but everything I see is about rehoming no real fix for the issue. Is rehoming really the only option?
 
welcome to byc.
if you can, make a drake pen. get them away from the chickens, and from their girl ducks too if you don’t have at least 4 girl ducks for each boy.
i had success rehoming a few drakes in the past, but this time of year there are a lot of drakes looking for a new homes so it might not be easy.
That’s why building a separate pen for your drakes if possible is a good idea so you can separate them immediately.
Not only can they injure hens they can kill them. I have a friend who lost a couple of chicken hens to a drake.
I once read that the mallard Drake is the number one most sexually aggressive animal in the entire animal Kingdom and most if not all of our domestic ducks were bred originally from Mallards
I would suggest not to buy ducks at tractor supply I did that once and got seven drake out of 10.
I was able to rehome all but one of them how be it it was two people who I know wanted to cook and eat them. You can buy sexed ducklings and get mostly females from a hatchery.
How is your girl doing?
 

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