too thin?

[casportpony]

Here is an avian body score picture that I found:



Gonna guess that between 2-3 is ideal, but can't say for sure... 1 is definitely way too thin and 4 is too fat.

-Kathy

Picture source:
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.michvma.org/resource/resmgr/MVC_Proceedings_2015/heatley_03.pdf

 

[DucksAndGardens]

Ok so we did a fecal float and found no worms but my vet friend says half the flock is underweight. Not seriously but enough so that I need to keep an eye on them. Since they have food available 24/7 there's no way to increase their feed. However I'm trying 2 things. One I now have 2 feeding stations in case the healthy weighters are hogging the food.


Secondly I've put them on a mixture of two different feeds. One is Earth First poultry feed. No go corn or soy, hormone free 20% protein.

The second is Scratch and Peck poultry feed. It's a corn free, whole grain, non gmo, organic feed.


I'm hoping the higher quality feed will put some weight on them.

We also wormed them and treated them for coccidia just in case because fecal floats can miss worms. We used oral ivermectin topically for the worms because honestly I didn't want to fight ducks to force feed them wormer.

 

[Darkwing4]

Perhaps in the morning put the thinner ones in a temporary feeding pen with a small kiddie pool. I used plastic garden mesh and bamboo poles for little paddocks before my run was done. My ducks love chopped fruit and veg tossed into clean water. Add feeder fish, too. When they're done, let them out to forage. This way you'll have a better sense of what they're actually eating. Keep an eye on pecking order, too. I think the added water might help.

 

[DucksAndGardens]

Well they have a kiddie pool on one side of the yard and then there are two large rubbermaid watering stations by each bowl of food. Plus there are two buckets and two bowls of food in their duck pen at night. Sadly I can't really separate the flock because of the noise issue. If I separate them they call out loudly to each other continuously until they are back in one group. I don't want to get my neighbors mad at me over loud obnoxious ducks. But I did notice this morning with the extra feeding area that the ducks split about half and half and were eating out of each bowl. I didn't see any bullying. I did notice however that they weren't eating the nice expensive whole grains but were picking out the pellets. So glad I spent $50 on special food for them to not eat it. lol

 

[Darkwing4]

It took my crew a couple of weeks to accept new pellets. I mixed a little of the new into the old and kept increasing the ratio. They're converts now. I hear you on the noise. Keep observing who's in front and who's always last to the feed bowl. My littlest, Biscotti, will never get the lion's share. My biggest, Henry, always does. It's just the pecking order. If you can't separate them, perhaps use a long trough or circle type feeder.