Pasture Ducks

We have been noticing a problem in the pasture with the onset of hot weather.

It is the presence of flies. Deer flies, specifically, but there are many varieties of fly out there. They love poop, especially cow poop. They also like landing on warm, sweaty surfaces, and in the summer, there is no warmer or sweatier surface than the back or face of a black cow (beautiful reddish undertones notwithstanding).

Darla doesn’t like flies.

Or people touching her.

Fly control is tricky. We have tried fly traps and tapes last summer, but they didn’t do a great job, probably because we started them too late in the season. However, we want to incorporate a biological control as our first line of defense. In other words, let the animals do the work for us.

This is part of why the barnyard area is now set up so that it can be at least partially closed off to the driveway, so that we can allow the chickens into the cow and pig area, to scratch through the manure and dig out the eggs and maggots before they become flies (it’s better than candy for a chicken).

For the pasture, we don’t have any meat birds right now, and we have too much going on to run a flock right now. Probably won’t get to it this summer with the remodel looming.

I thought about getting guinea fowl, as they are, by reputation, the best insect hunters out there. But in the meantime, we have ducks, so…

Why not put them out there?

At first they were not happy about it. Ducks do not like changes to their routine. They had gotten used to being in the orchard, and at first they kept trying to get back into the orchard.

We had to chase them down the field and close them in a paddock behind the cows and sheep.

The next day we got one egg. Ducks don’t like changes to their routine.

But, after feeding them, we found another egg.

This has become a trend since then. They are laying later in the day, and most often by the water trough.

We have only found a couple of eggs in the duckmobile at all.

We have been having issues with crows stealing the eggs as well. The ducks lay eggs in the open after the humans have already left for the day, then the crows come in and steal them all.

On Tuesday we got back to the farm around 9:00, and found four eggs clustered around the water trough.

The duck feeding behavior has changed as well. While they were in the orchard, they generally hung around waiting for feeding time, and when they were fed they would clean up the feed in a couple of minutes before going back out to forage.

Here, they don’t eat the feed as quickly. Instead of rushing in to get feed, they are starting to run around the paddock first thing as soon as they are moved to find bugs. As in the picture above, they all checked out the feed and ate a few mouthfuls, but then they ran out of the duckmobile and started dibbling in the hay in the corner. They do eat their feed eventually, but they are mostly interested in looking for bugs. So that is good.

I can’t say for sure whether there are fewer flies on the pasture now that the ducks are out there. It seems unlikely they would make such an impact in just a week. More likely the weather turning a touch cooler has helped more than the ducks.

Another impact is that we have a duck with bumblefoot. This is a painful infection of the duck’s foot pad that comes from getting cut or scratched. Unfortunately, this is a risk with pastured ducks. The pasture is full of dried grass stalks, and in some places there are ground-running black berries. We had another duck with bumblefoot a month or so ago who seems to be recovering. We’ll keep an eye on this one and see if we need to do any interventions.