WaterfowlWisdom: Tips and Tales from the Poultry Keepers

Thinking of Raising Ducks and Geese? Here’s What You Need to Know! 

In this episode of The Intentional Poultry Keeper, we dive into the wisdom of waterfowl care—from feeding and housing to breeding and health management. Whether you're a backyard keeper, amateur breeder, or experienced poultry enthusiast, this episode is packed with practical tips and fascinating tales about ducks, geese, and mixed flocks!

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

·      The key differences between ducks, geese, and chickens

·      Best feed and nutrition practices for healthy waterfowl

·      How to keep duck bedding dry and coops clean

·      The truth about water sources—how much do ducks and geese really need?

·      Breeding behaviors and how to prevent common waterfowl health issues

Are Ducks or Geese Right for Your Flock? Let’s find out!

What’s your biggest challenge with raising ducks or geese? Drop us a comment!

 Know a fellow poultry keeper who needs this info? Share this episode with them!

Timestamps

0:00 - Welcome to The Poultry Keepers Podcast
2:15 - Why waterfowl require different care than chickens
6:30 - The best feed and nutrition tips for ducks and geese
12:45 - Managing wet bedding and water access
18:00 - Understanding breeding behaviors in ducks and geese
23:30 - Common health issues and how to prevent them
30:00 - Final thoughts

Hashtags:

#WaterfowlWisdom #RaisingDucks #BackyardWaterfowl #PoultryKeepers #DucksAndGeese #WaterfowlBreeding #HomesteadPoultry #HealthyWaterfowl

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Transcript

Alex 0:00

Welcome to another episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, where we talk poultry from Feathers to Function. In this episode Rip, Mandelyn, and John wrap up their conversation about waterfowl. So let's get right to it shall we.

0:13

Yeah. Yeah.

Rip Stalvey 0:23

And another thing about water and ducks and geese is you can give them a clean container of water. And it seems like in a matter of minutes, they can have that thing, the water out of the water and all over the floor slung around, moved around and make a huge mess with it.

Mandelyn Royal 0:45

Oh yeah, they're dirty birds.

Rip Stalvey 0:46

The one thing that I did find that worked fairly well, you can take a gallon can and get a piece of one inch thick lumber and cut a circle that will fit. fit down inside that can with about a quarter of an inch space on either side, and then drill a half inch hole in the center of that. That will allow them to tip that board down below the water level they can drink, but they can't get their head in there and sling it around and make a mess with it.

Mandelyn Royal 1:16

So my solution was to get the flat backed buckets and clip them on the fence outside and feed them inside. So they go inside and they eat. Yeah. And then to make a mess, they have to go outside. And that really saved a lot on feed. It prevented them from being able to make the food and water slurry. Cause that stuff will spray six feet in every direction because they very much want to take a bite and then dabble in water, take a bite, dabble in water. And if you have your food next to your water source, it's going to get messy in a hurry.

Rip Stalvey 1:49

It doesn't take long. That's for sure. It doesn't take long. And they have

Mandelyn Royal 1:53

wetter than. Their poops are wetter too because of all their water play. So I actually don't ever mix my waterfowl with my chickens. I keep them totally separate because that extra dampness.

Rip Stalvey 2:05

And speaking of waterfowl poop, if you ever let them free range around your house, invariably where they're going to want to go poop is on your sidewalk or your porch.

John Gunterman 2:17

And if you think chicken poop is slippery.

Rip Stalvey 2:19

Oh boy.

John Gunterman 2:21

That's why there's all these sayings about goose poop and duck poop.

Mandelyn Royal 2:26

Yeah, I keep mine in their own space where they have their own pond their own water and inside their coop I've got to clean it probably two to three more times as often as I do for a chicken coop of the same size with the same number of birds just because of that dampness.

Rip Stalvey 2:44

Let's talk a little bit about nutrition for waterfowl. It's similar to chicken nutrition but they have additional requirements for proteins and some other things. Waterfowl, for example, have a higher requirement for niacin. They need much more niacin than chickens do. Yes, they do. They have to have that supplemented in their feed.

Mandelyn Royal 3:08

And they can't have medicated feed?

Rip Stalvey 3:10

No. They can't have the feed with the coccidiosis, coccidiostat in it because the coccidiostat helps prevent coccidiosis, because it binds up nice and it's not available to the little OO system. To cause problems. So by binding up the niacin, it just really short changes and it can kill your ducks if you'd feed them that stuff.

John Gunterman 3:37

It also inhibits niacin and thiamine uptake as well, which are two critical amino acids for development. So don't do it

Mandelyn Royal 3:46

now when you're growing the

Rip Stalvey 3:48

Especially

Mandelyn Royal 3:51

the Pekin or the other large fast growing types They are probably the soonest to show with a niacin deficiency because of that accelerated growth that they have.

Rip Stalvey 4:01

Yes Yeah, waterfowl do grow exceptionally fast when you compare it to a chicken

Mandelyn Royal 4:07

They

Rip Stalvey 4:07

can go from a brand new baby duckling to a nearly full grown duck in just a matter of weeks. It doesn't take them long. They have a protein, a little bit higher protein requirements than chickens do probably 20 to 22 percent for waterfowl. Overall probably closer to 24, 26 percent for ducklings, which that would be far too much for chickens.

Mandelyn Royal 4:35

In their natural forage, they're looking for crustaceans and snails and those higher protein tidbits, and then they

4:42

Yeah.

Mandelyn Royal 4:42

Eat a little greens, but they're mainly after those higher protein snacks.

Rip Stalvey 4:49

Another thing to remember when you're raising waterfowl is brooding them. They don't require as high temperatures as chickens do. Most chickens, they recommend starting out at 95 degrees. Ducks, you're going to be closer to 90 degrees, but, and they also don't need warmth as long as chickens do. We were just talking about how fast Young waterfowl grow and they can get really big on you real quick.

Mandelyn Royal 5:17

Yes, they will. But it is important to note that when they first hatch, they're not waterproof yet.

Rip Stalvey 5:23

No.

Mandelyn Royal 5:23

And you don't want to encourage swimming before they start getting that oil gland activated and preening themselves to get that oil coating. Cause if you take a freshly hatched duckling and put it in water, it'll start to sink because it doesn't have that oil coating to help with the buoyancy. And they can get chilled really easy. So you can give them a little splash pad so that they start printing, but I don't even worry about giving them a. Water play area until after two weeks old.

Rip Stalvey 5:55

Yeah, and they can make a huge mess with it. It doesn't take them

Mandelyn Royal 5:59

But it's so fun to watch them. Oh, I know

Rip Stalvey 6:02

it's a lot of fun I did it when we first got our cotton patch goslings. They were about four weeks old and we put them in a actually what it was a gator pond over at the state fairgrounds and we put them in there so they'd have access to that pond, which was deep. It was about eight feet deep. And to watch those things, they would go underwater and they'd actually fly underwater with their wings. They had a ball doing that. But breeding waterfowl that's a little bit different than breeding chickens, particularly if you're breeding geese. They prefer to have a long term pair bonding. And they don't do well in a flock mating situation like you would do with regular ducks or chickens, but they usually one pair of geese that you can't get more females in there with them. Most of them, ducks, you can do a little bit more than that, but and, we talked about this earlier. They're going to require access to clean water. For successful mating and egg collection, it is difficult, and I'm being real generous when I say difficult, to keep waterfowl eggs clean, they can be really dirty, waterfowl has this tendency for water and dirt and mud, and that very easily transfers to eggs that are in the nest, so they can get in the nest. you can have really grubby looking eggs in short order.

Mandelyn Royal 7:30

It doesn't seem to affect them much once it's hatching time.

Rip Stalvey 7:34

Surprisingly it does not. It really does not.

Mandelyn Royal 7:38

When I still lived in an urban area I had a little handful of ducks and I was trying to make that work in an urban setting so I, we built this fancy run that had a kiddie pool with a drain installed that was elevated on a gravel bed. So all I had to do was go hose off that poo, and then I had clean gravel, there was no mud, the eggs were spotless. But what I didn't account for is every time I hosed off that gravel, all that poo and water just sunk. And that next season Ooh, that is stinky.

John Gunterman 8:15

We had to dismantle

Mandelyn Royal 8:16

the whole thing.

John Gunterman 8:18

Yeah. Sink and sink. The fly

Mandelyn Royal 8:20

breeding going on in that moisture as it had built up from the season before. Yeah. That was a great idea for about a month.

John Gunterman 8:28

You need a rotating paddock design if you're going to do this. There's a lot of things to consider about keeping things clean and sanitary you were talking about growth rates though and these are pretty amazing. Critters and the way that they can be well managed looking at a feed conversion ratio, like anywhere from 2. 5 to 3 is not too shabby.

Rip Stalvey 8:52

It's incredible when you stop and think about it. It really is. It's

John Gunterman 8:56

1 thing

Rip Stalvey 8:57

we haven't heritage

John Gunterman 8:58

poultry. I hope to get a 5 to 1. It's more like 4 to 1 in my record keeping. So if a good way to put on a lot of meat fast is waterfowl, but your infrastructure needs to be able to support it.

Rip Stalvey 9:09

1 thing we haven't talked about. Health of waterfowl and by and large they're pretty healthy.

Mandelyn Royal 9:17

Yeah, they're pretty resilient. There's not much that phases them

Rip Stalvey 9:20

You've got, particularly with some of the bigger heavier breeds, you've got to watch for leg problems, respiratory infections are another common thing, parasite issues can be another one, I'm going to get on my soapbox here for just a minute, there is a problem In waterfowl called angel wing and what angel wing is it's where the last joint of the wing those feathers grow so fast that they cannot support them so that flops out the bottom of the ring wing drops out or turns outside this is not I repeat this is not the same thing as a split wing. Chickens have split wings. Waterfowl have angel wings. But I don't know why folks started calling split wings and chicken angel wing, but it's not the same thing. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that angel wing and waterfowl is caused by high levels of protein in their diet because it grows so fast. I am of the opinion that there has to be a genetic propensity or a tendency for those birds to get angel wing. But the nutrition and diet is definitely a contributing factor to it. And I've got a, I haven't posted it yet, but I'm going to be posting an article here in the next few days. It's in this week's rotation on angel wing and what you can do about it. But it's basically just You know, these things are growing so fast and you got to watch their protein uptake. Don't go too crazy like we do with chicken sometimes. We talked about temperament.

Mandelyn Royal 11:12

What about their flight ability? I know heavy ducks and heavy geese. They can't fly, not for any distance, but the smaller they get. The more likely it is that they actually can take off and fly. Call ducks can fly, can't they? They

Rip Stalvey 11:31

can fly like a quail. Mine

Mandelyn Royal 11:33

were what do they call that, pinioned?

Rip Stalvey 11:35

That's another good thing to talk about. Even geese. Some breeds of geese are exceptional flyers. Those cotton patch geese we got when we got when we took them out of where we had been brooding them, and they were up pretty much adult size and were just feathering in, we put them in a, just an open pasture like environment thing there at the museum, and one of them immediately took off and flew completely out of sight, never to be seen again.

John Gunterman 12:05

Nature finds a way.

Rip Stalvey 12:07

And they were bigger than a duck for sure. They were good size, even large ducks Muscovies. They're pretty good flyers too.

Mandelyn Royal 12:15

I was told by a Muscovy breeder that if you have hens at one year old that can still fly, they're a cull because they're not heavy enough. If they're good quality, they can't fly after a year old because they've got weight to hold them down.

Rip Stalvey 12:30

That's for sure. That's for sure.

Mandelyn Royal 12:32

Several years ago, a friend of mine found a Canada goose left abandoned in a parking lot in a big mall area, just one little gosling. And she asked, What she should do with it. And I was like ideally it gets raised with other geese and transition back to a wild lifestyle. She was like I can't do that, but I had a batch of babies the same age. So I took it and she grew up, hit flight age. And when they would take off running across the field, she gained her first flight and she probably got 30, 40 foot up in the air. And I was watching her and I saw her head looking down going, Holy crap! I

13:14

can

Mandelyn Royal 13:16

fly! And then she crash landed right into the fence.

Rip Stalvey 13:20

That's an acquired skill.

John Gunterman 13:22

I enjoy watching parents teach their Goslings to fly out on the pond across from us. It's pretty neat the way they flap just over the water and they splash the water with their wings. And they'll just do that two or three times with the goslings in a little group watching. They're just showing them, Hey, this is how we do it. This is how we do it. And then a couple of days later, they're off.

Rip Stalvey 13:43

Madeline, you were talking about crash landing. And I think. Most of us are probably familiar with that old quote that any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. And I saw a picture that illustrated it perfectly. It had that quote on it, but what the picture was, you could see two skid lines through, it was light snow through the snow across the coast. Top of the frozen lake and they came to a stop and you saw these little goose feet walking away from it. Yeah, that happens

John Gunterman 14:15

in the spring when the migratory waterfowl come back and we haven't iced out yet. It's pretty funny.

Rip Stalvey 14:21

Yeah, that gave me a chuckle when I saw that. But, if you're interested in getting started with Waterfowl, get, it's the same way as getting started in chickens. Find someone who can mentor you. You will do much, much better with that help. Also, if you can locate someone, that you want to get a start from. That, that's a good person to ask to mentor you and finding good waterfowl is the same techniques, the same thing as involved in finding good chickens. So if you have the space and if you feel like you're up to the management task and you want some waterfowl, by all means get somebody and give it a try. They are a lot of fun.

Mandelyn Royal 15:04

They have a smartness to them. That's pretty neat too. There's been a couple of times over the years where people reached out to me to see if I would take their one duck. And these are people who didn't have chickens. They were not prepared. And this poor little duck had to grow up with dogs. It's happened two or three times now, but two times stand out in my mind. One duck, she thought she was a poodle. The other duck, she thought she was a German Shepherd. And I had German Shepherds and bringing those ducks home, they were separate from each other, and introducing them to my ducks. I first started by letting them meet my dogs because my dogs are responsible and They could handle being around a new bird. And then I would let my ducks out. And the look that they got on their face when they saw ducks getting in the pool and playing for the first time. They hung with my dogs for a week. But at the end of that week, both of them figured out the exact same time after a full week, you know what? I might actually be a duck.

Rip Stalvey 16:10

Oh

Mandelyn Royal 16:11

my goodness.

Rip Stalvey 16:12

And you know they are smart. And particularly geese. I have seen our cotton patch geese over there at the museum. They would encounter something that was a little strange or they weren't sure of. And they would stop, and they would stare at it, and they would tilt their head to one side, and then to the other. I wonder if this is something that I could maybe put to good use, or I could eat it, or whatever it is. And they, you can just almost see the gears turning inside their head.

Mandelyn Royal 16:42

Yeah, you can see those little gears turning and because of that, I would highly suggest against raising one. If you're going to do it, get a flock,

Rip Stalvey 16:52

at least

Mandelyn Royal 16:53

three.

Rip Stalvey 16:53

They're they're just like chickens. They're flock animals. They do better in that environment.

Mandelyn Royal 16:58

So this Easter, if someone gives you one duck, either find a flock for it or go get another. Don't torture them and make them think they're dogs.

Rip Stalvey 17:07

Yeah, it's not too good when they chase cars.

John Gunterman 17:09

That's been my experience down in Memphis. Every public park seems to have a flock of feral waterfowl. Oh, they're not

Mandelyn Royal 17:17

feral. They're dumped. Those are people doing the exact opposite of finding them responsible homes. They're taking domestic animals and putting them in a wild situation that they are not prepared for.

John Gunterman 17:30

Yeah, so they're chasing you through the Kroger parking lot. First, they back up traffic because they come across the street from behind the park. And backup traffic in both directions for about 5 minutes and then they chase people around the Kroger parking lot.

Rip Stalvey 17:45

We've got that problem here and where I live in Lakeland, Florida, except it's Publix, right? That's the only

John Gunterman 17:50

difference.

Rip Stalvey 17:52

We have 1 lake called Lake Mirror and all the dump ducks wind up there. There's ducks and geese and swans. Now, the swans were the only Birds that were brought in legitimately and they were a gift from Queen Elizabeth sent six pairs of mute swans over here. I don't know how many swans they've raised over the years, but now they got the mute swans, the black neck swans, the black swans, but it's the place to go and hang out with Waterfowl if you're interested. Real popular with little kids.

John Gunterman 18:28

If I want to fill in the southern leg of my Sibley's Birds East book, I'll know a stop.

Rip Stalvey 18:34

There you go.

John Gunterman 18:35

Bring my

Rip Stalvey 18:36

binoculars. Guys, that's all that I have to go over. Anything that you guys have, or you have a question maybe I could answer, I don't know.

Mandelyn Royal 18:46

I feel like we covered quite a bit, and My only parting words is think long and hard. If you want to double your chore load by having ducks.

Rip Stalvey 18:56

Yeah,

Mandelyn Royal 18:57

they are more than what a chicken needs.

Rip Stalvey 19:00

Keeping ducks is not just all ducky and I'll just leave it at that. And if they're going to be entertaining

Mandelyn Royal 19:08

birds, they are definitely entertaining. They're great. They

Rip Stalvey 19:11

have wonderful personalities. They really do.

John Gunterman 19:14

Yeah. And don't share a waterfront property with domestic and native. Yeah. Waterfowl because they don't mix when you start mixing all the

Mandelyn Royal 19:23

yeah, this is true,

John Gunterman 19:24

Vectors together.

Mandelyn Royal 19:26

Thankfully, we don't have a pond or anything to encourage wild visits at most. We might get a blue heron back in the creek, but they stay outside of our fence. Cause if the, especially with the AI concerns float around with the avian influenza, that's largely being transported around by wild

Rip Stalvey 19:46

waterfowl.

Mandelyn Royal 19:47

So you don't want them hanging out in your yard if they're wild and keep your domestic separate for sure.

Rip Stalvey 19:55

Absolutely.

John Gunterman 19:56

Yeah. That's a genuine concern. Be precautious and be safe, but they're delicious. Raisin. If you can't absolutely they taste a lot of fun

Mandelyn Royal 20:06

remain

John Gunterman 20:07

Okay, rip sign us out.

Rip Stalvey 20:08

All right, everybody we've had a lot of fun today and we hope you have too we'll be back with you Every tuesday bright and early at 12 a. m in the morning. So if you're up early Catch us then but until then you guys keep having fun and keep raising your birds and above all keep enjoying your birds. Happy poultry keeping everybody.