All posts by : Laurie

I’m a little concerned about Whitey, the White Appleyard.  He (she?) seems a little more lethargic than the others, and sits a lot, even while eating and drinking.  He’s got an odd reddish spot alongside his neck that particularly shows up when he’s wet, he just seems a bit odd. 

I wonder if he’s growing too fast, and if we’ve given the ducks too much protein.  According to the book, we should be dropping the protein content about now anyway, so I’ll mix some lower protein ingredients into their food to drop down the protein percentage.  We got some organic “hen scratch” at 8% protein, so hopefully that will help, along with a little more oatmeal.  I’ve also been adding some water or whey to their food, as suggested, with my kitchen pastry blender.  It makes a nice, moist, crumbly consistency, and I’ve noticed they don’t run to their waterer quite as quickly or frequently now while eating.  I should have done this from the start—that food seemed awfully dry!

The ducks moved out to their own house today, at two weeks old!  This morning one of them managed to escape the brooder box in the basement, so we decided to hurry up and get their own house completed enough for them to move in.  Tim took a break from work, and I helped, too.  Tim made another frame with hardware cloth on it, so added to the first frame (which was in the brooder) we’ve more than doubled their living space inside.  It’ll be a lot cuter when it’s done and painted, but for now it’s functional–it’s even insulated!  We put the heat lamps out there, since it’s still pretty cool at night.  We got this nifty door at a recycle place: it has interchangeable glass panes or screen door, so we can close ’em up and night or when it’s cold, and let them have more ventilation during the day.

In addition to finishing the inside of the duck house, we put up some temporary fencing to make a pen for them outside the house.  It is so warm now in the daytime, we feel they can spend a fair amount of time outside.  The pool is there, but blocked off so that they can only enter when we are present.  It’s been much cooler since that first day we put them into the pool, so they haven’t been in it since.  When it warms up, we’ll let them go in again, with supervision.

Here’s a video showing them outside by their house.

We’re building “Duck Inn”, the duck house.  The plan is detailed here in Tim’s videos:

We are fortunate to live in an area that is plentiful with livestock and feed shops.  As we researched options for duck feed, and particularly organic feed, we discovered that the most affordable organic feed available to us is produced right here in Fort Collins at Ranch-Way Feeds.  We can buy it right at the mill, where we’ve already been buying horse feed for several years.  They don’t make waterfowl blends, but we’re combining their turkey starter with chick starter and some oatmeal and a little grit for our ducks’ starter feed.**  That combination was recommended in Storey’s Guide to Raising Ducks, by Holderread, so hopefully that will do the trick.  I suppose we’ll mess around with different combinations as they grow, and do the best we can.  We want to keep them organically fed.