Do Adult Ducks Get Along With Adult Chickens?

If you already have a brood of chickens, you may want to consider adding a different species of fowl to your little farm, such as ducks. Ducks are attractive birds who take to domestication readily, and they produce eggs just as well as chickens. Adult ducks and chickens get along fine. Rather than a personality conflict, you need to be concerned about other issues when keeping these two types of bird together.

  1. Perches and Nests

    • Chickens sleep on roosts, so you can get away with a fairly small coop for your chickens because they live on multiple levels. Ducks, though, don't like split-level housing. They only use the floor and need room to move about as well as extra space for their nests. Although your ducks and your chickens will get along famously in the social department, you'll need to provide separate quarters to house them because of their different spatial needs.

    The Water Issue

    • Water is an issue that adds to the difficulty of trying to house ducks with chickens. Ducks not only need water to drink, they also need it to bathe in. The ducks will invariably get water everywhere as they come and go from the bath, drenching everything in their paths and creating a condition that the chickens won't be able to live in. Chicken feathers get matted when wet, which leaves them vulnerable to illness because they won't be able to keep their body temperature up. Also, in the 2004 technical guide "Small-Scale Poultry Production," Emmanuel Babafunso Sonaiya and S.E.J. Swan advise enterprising poultry farmers that wet floors in a poultry house is an ideal environment for fowl cholera, and while ducks can tolerate such viruses without succumbing to them, chickens cannot.

    Temperatures

    • The different temperatures that ducks and chickens require for healthy, comfortable living is another issue in keeping the two birds together. Ducks have a layer of fat that insulates them from the cold, useful for taking winter-time dips in frigid ponds. Since chickens lack this insulation, they need a warmer home, one with no cracks or gaps in the walls that would allow cold drafts inside. If other issues didn't make housing chickens and ducks together inadvisable, the warmth factor would not be a reason to keep the two birds apart. While chickens cannot tolerate extreme cold, ducks can be kept in a warmer environment than they need. It will affect them, though: they'll eat less and won't produce as much insulating fat.

    Adults and Babies

    • Ducks and chickens get along well enough that you can let them interact in a common yard, but it's interesting to note that the two birds are so compatible that a chicken will take over the hatching and baby-raising duties if a mother duck is too temperamental or shows no interest in nesting and being a mama. You'll have to help out when the hen is still sitting on the eggs; the duck eggs will be too big for her to turn them once a day, which she'll instinctively do with her own eggs. Once everyone hatches, though, she'll treat the ducklings just like her own chicks. In her 2004 book "Raising Animals by the Moon," Louise Riotte wrote that for the first four weeks after hatching, you'll want to keep mama and babies confined to a small cage, about 3 feet by 3 feet. This is because at that age the ducklings won't be able to keep up with a roaming mother hen as easily as the chicks will, and they'll become exhausted trying.