u/Artywyrm

Face plants every night XD

Hey! This is our girl Charlie, we rescued her years ago now- just found her under our car as a tiny tiny baby- and now she’s grown into a beautiful sweet strong hunter and managed to convince me to love cats as much as I loved dogs before. Amazing hunter for the farm, doesn’t scratch the furniture, loves cuddles and doesn’t kill me when I give her a bath XD (I didn’t train her to do that I was honestly shocked)

But I have no idea what breed she is, and describing her appearance to people is so tricky sometimes because she’s not really one color like orange or black 😂 and idk, id just enjoy the closure of knowing.

Some folks where asking about the self cleaning pond I made and I’ll try to record something talking about it since I made a more ‘beginning craftsman friendly’ version, but until then here’s a link to the design I based mine on! Says he has a full tutorial on his channel but I just went based on this.

Hope it helps someone out! Clean water isn’t impossible!!

While waiting for our older ducks to acclimate to our existing flock and move outside, I’ve been keeping our two ducklings with our new hatchling chicks with heavy supervision. A temporary solution while they’re all still small.
You can’t keep ducks and chickens together brooding because of their different needs, ducks are messier and get bigger faster, chicks are much more delicate by comparison when it comes to their health too.

But man, these guys get along so well. It’s honestly been a blessing to have the group like this, the chicks bigger sisters are so caring and let them walk all over them and cuddle up- probably helping keep them warm, and the chicks learned where the food and water was thanks to them, I didn’t need to show them as much as I did with my first chicks that where raised alone.

It’s very unfortunate that they have to split, but in the meantime, we can appreciate the sweetness of them being together-

And who knows, maybe they’ll bond again when they grow up and can be in the same space again.

I think it’s hilarious how there’s plenty of room in the brooder but the chicks are determined to squeeze against their big sisters XD

Asking more experienced chicken/duck owners, have you ever brought chickens into the flock? How easy is it for them to get along, and how do I know the chickens are being friendly?

Our rooster is very nice if that helps, he’s friendly to me and my dog even though we recently got him from someone else, so not mean to new things.

They got loud for a bit then seem to have lost interest-

We own a bit of property in the backwoods of my home state, and we care for chickens and ducks on our land- we have a bird dog that mostly does well with the birds but he gets very excited and wants to play with the little ones because of all their noises and his natural instincts- he’s done very well with our babies but naturally he’s got some excess stress from the new arrivals we have.

Unfortunately that led to him cornering a bird on our property while he was out using the restroom and bullying it. He didn’t mean to hurt it, and luckily it doesn’t have any actual injuries- it was hopping around when I gave it a warm bath to clean the dirt off it and make sure it didn’t get infected,

But it’s missing a lot of feathers, tail feathers are basically gone. He was probably nipping at it trying to make the poor thing run from him so he could chase it. So obviously I couldn’t leave it alone. It’s hard to tell its age, it seems very developed by its size and the fact I don’t see much down but it does have some pin feathers around the head and neck. So my guess is fledgling.

I’d take it to a local rehab but so far the closest one is at least an hour and a half away from us. I’ll keep looking, but my question is-

If we try and keep it till it’s feathers grow back, what’s the best care situation? We have some scratch grains flock feed crumbles and mealworms that I put all together in a dish. I made a separate water dish for it since it seems old enough to not need them to be soaked or mulched.

Do I need to dip its beak into the water to show it where to drink or will it find the dish on its own? How much space does it need? Is the flock-feed scratch grains and mealworms mixture a good idea or do y’all have a recommendation feed that I can look for? Would it be better to get it a cage with a perch, or is a box with pine shavings for it to nest in better?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

And if anyone can manage to figure out the breed of bird, that would be nice too, so I could find a more personalized care schedule. Thank you!

Good news maybe? And bad news definitely. We got four very healthy chicks, and the one that was born with the mushy toosh looks a lot better! I think I separated them in time or perhaps it wasn’t mushy chick syndrome, or perhaps they just look healthier- but their naval doesn’t look infected and the sack has deflated immensely. Still a saggy skin tag that I have to watch, and there’s always a chance they look fine but will pass away later on.

Bad news, one of the other chicks number six, was born very hurt and sick. We’ll have to put them down, but this is the risk we take hatching eggs. Maybe if I’d noticed it sooner it could’ve had a story like our main baby.

TLDR; more experienced chick owners, how’s this look in terms of recovery? Doing better? Or do we still have to worry?

Previous post-
https://www.reddit.com/r/chickens/s/WzwBiEpBam

Hey guys! We just got some new babies to add to our flock. We don’t have a lot of money but I’m pretty handy and managed to construct a temporary separation wall so the ducks can acclimate to each other. Our original 3 are 4 ish weeks old Indian runner ducks, bigger and they run around a lot when spooked. They’re very good at sticking together in a flock though, so, hoping to get some info from other more seasoned duck owners. The babies are blue Swedish ducks so a different breed-

When do you know it’s safe to merge the flocks? The older ducks are very interested in the new babies but it’s hard to tell if they want to be friendly or bully them. They sit close to the cage and try to fit their head through to see them, and I don’t know if it’s biting/pecking, or preening, because these guys grew up preening each other often.

I will be transferring the bigger ducks outside soon, but I want to be able to acclimate them to the outdoors. (Take them outside for a few hours take them inside)
UNLESS y’all have experience just taking your 4-5 week old ducks outside and them being fine.

(NOTE outside would mean introducing them to our flock of chickens, 9 and 1 rooster, the rooster is very friendly and standoffish and the others are curious and took well to a new rooster)

SO the question is, when can they merge? Or should I focus on transferring the bigger ducks outside to the coop? Photo is the best I could get