Very healthy duck got sick suddenly. I dont know what to do. Pls help!

loveducklings

In the Brooder
Sep 28, 2020
5
6
11
Hello, we have two pet ducklings and we got them 24 days ago and we speculate they were around a week old when they arrived. One of the ducks -Bambi- was noticably thinner and smaller than the other one -Bobby- and their size difference only got bigger with time. Other than Bambi being smaller he didn't have any other condition that would cause concern. However one day we let them out to play on the grass under the sunlight (as we do everyday) and bambi couldn't walk at all, he kept his foot closed and stood on it the wrong way. We got extremely concerned and suspecting it can be some kind of deficiancy we started supplementing him with any possible supplement he might need (niacin, vitamin D, calcium etc.). After 4 days he got a lot better, he is able to stand walk and even run if he needs to. His kind of stands funny on his right foot still but that is also getting better.
Today we let them out to play again and everything looked normal at first and they were both able to run. However after their daily swimming session we noticed Bobby (healthy one) couldn't walk at all he is able to stand on his elbows (or whatever that is called in ducks) but aside from that he can barely stand up.
He is able to move his legs when we lift him up but he has a really hard time standing up to the point that he crawls to his food rather than walking. We also noticed he is making a quack like noise but we are not sure that is a wanna be quack of a duckling going through puberty or him having respiratory issues.
I would be very happy to know if anyone had similar problems with their ducks and how they cured it if it was cured.
 
Welcome to BYC. Can you take a video, upload it to youtube or Vimeo, then copy and paste the link here?

This includes the formerly healthy duckling Bobby not being able to walk as well as the initially sick / kind of recovered duckling Bambi having problems standing on his right foot.

You can also take a look at this older video from 4 days ago in which Bambi is still not able to stand up on its own. (Bobby was healthy at this point)

Thank you for the quick reply.
 
We are feeding them a mixture that is sold as duck food mainly but they have a diverse diet since they get to eat a lot of insects during their 1-2 hours outdoor sessions on the yard. We also feed them grapes, cucumbers, tomatos and we got advice to feed them chicken eggs to supply them calcium and we have been doing that for the last 4 days since bambi got sick.

We went to the vet for Bambi aside from telling us what we know he tried to charge us around 40USD for some vitamins and his advice which is %15 of monthly minimum wage in our country.

We plan on just observing Bobby for a couple days before taking him to another vet because of our previous experiences.
 
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Do you still have the vitamins? It looks to me like both might be suffering from a niacin deficiency.
We supply them with both a multivitamin syrup, another amino acid solution for animals that is high in niacin and vitamin D. Although we were mainly giving it to Bambi since Bobby was healthy and ate a lot. He still got some but it was around 1/3 of what Bambi gets because we were not sure about the effects of the particular products we used. We were comfortable getting little experimental when it came to Bambi because of our desperation however we didn't want to take the same risk with Bobby, starting from today we will up Bobby's supplement doses as well. We just want to know if this can be something else since it developed so rapidly for Bobby. He went from healthiest duck to not being able to stand up in a single day. We are also worried he catched a cold.
 

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