This is not an extensive and scholarly treatise on the keeping of ducks in the suburban environment, but merely a distillation of our one and only duck-keeping experience.
Back in the early ‘90s my brother and his wife used to keep horses in a semi-rural area west of Sydney and they were living in a flat at the time (yes, I’m getting to the duck!). Well one Saturday afternoon they called over to see us and said “Here!” and presented us with a large, white, feathered object – “It’s a duck”! We said. Their reply was “It followed us home can you keep it! Donna the Duck had arrived! They were feeding the horses when this somewhat perturbed duck had come up and accosted them. It seems likely that somewhere, someone had bought a cute duckling for the kids and when the duckling had become a duck they decided to “set her free” or in other words provide a free meal for the next fox that happened along. It became obvious very early on that she was a domesticated duck and had no skills at all to live in the wild.
My brother of course realised this in an instant and because they lived in a flat they couldn’t keep her and we have chooks and ducks is almost chooks so......please? As soft hearted as we are (or should that be soft headed?) we just couldn’t turn her away so she came to live with us and annoy the living daylights out of the dog and the chooks.
We had no idea if she was a duck or a drake, or even how to tell. Fortunately I was able to do a bit of research and found out that ducks “quack” while drakes hiss and she confirmed my suspicions the next morning by presenting us with the first of many, many eggs. An Irish mate who was originally from a rural area of Ireland came over and pronounced her to be a fine Aylesbury duck, so we now knew her sex and variety, things were looking up.
Ducks need water. It’s as simple as that and on one occasion when a rainstorm put a 150mm deep creek through the back yard Donna was in her element, she loved every minute of it. In non-rainstorm times we had an old baby’s bath left over from when we had the kids which we kept filled with water for her and this provided hours of fun and entertainment not only for Donna, but for the whole family. Donna was a very personable duck.
She was pretty good at foraging for herself and we gave her plenty of snails and slugs from the garden and lots of whole grain bread, which she would tend to make slop out of in the baby’s bath, but she seemed to enjoy it. A side effect of this was that the baby’s bath got pretty disgusting, pretty quickly so that we had to clean it out at least every second day. She also shared the chook pellets with the chooks and we gave her whole wheat every so often as well. She got egg shells crunched up in her food to keep her calcium levels up for egg laying. All in all she was a happy well fed duck.
She seemed to be able to sleep just about anywhere too, and wasn’t particular about where she made her bed. It was occasionally possible to run the risk of stomping on her when going out the back door and down the steps early in the morning. In the cooler weather, however, it was quite common to find Donna, the dog and the chooks all curled up together in the chook shed. I’m sure they had parties in there after we had all gone to sleep.
She was a productive little thing too, and I reckon we got 360 eggs out of her that first year, but she had no nesting drive whatsoever and first thing in the morning you had to be REALLY be careful when walking in the back yard. One of her favourite spots was just on the grass somewhere under the clothes line. The other clothes line issue we had was that ducks don’t crap like chooks, in discrete semi dry round droppings, it is sloppy and explodes out of their rear end all over the grass and more often than not, yep it was under the clothes line. For a number of years there using the clothes line was remarkably like hanging out your washing in a mine field.
As wonderful as she was, she did have some annoying habits like the unhealthy fascination she had with the dogs droppings but what finally caused us to get rid of her was the noise she would make at 6:00am in summer or winter to get bread. It got to the stage where the neighbours were starting to organise a party for us, a lynching party! So in the end Donna had to go.
No, we didn’t eat her; she was like a member of the family just a very noisy one! At that time Linda had friends in her church that had a property about half an hour’s drive from us and they also had ducks so they were the ideal candidate to accept Donna. Thus ended our only foray into suburban duck keeping........so far!
