Chicken coops plans

I’d like to make a plea for Muscovy Ducks.

They’re descended from a South American wild duck, so not derived from Mallards, as so many Western domestic ducks are. This gives them some advantages, specifically a different quality of meat, which is less greasy than ducks and geese as we know them, something between veal and venison in flavour. The drakes in particular get big and heavy, with plenty of meat.

These are hardy birds — in the British and similar climates — and need little weather protection. And of course you can expect them to be more waterproof than chickens. If you have waterways and standing water right by your place, as I have, Muscovys will use them as a resource, and bring home the results of their foraging outside the boundaries of your own ground, in the same way that bee colonies and pigeon-lofts do.

My birds are kept with minimal protection either from weather or predators, and are allowed constant free-range. Their only — partial — defence apart from their own watchfulness and ability to get up high in the air within a second or so, are my dogs. (The dogs — especially my LGD Turkish Shepherd Dog –would do a lot more, but have to be kept within a boundary fence, whereas the ducks can roam at will)

I’m working a broad plan which allows the birds all the freedom they want, with their flight feathers never clipped, and allows the foxes to take any who aren’t sharp enough to evade them. Already, in the second generation since set up, the fools and the sharpies have been well sorted. Naturally, only the sharpies will be around to breed next Spring — to pass on their sharpness to next year’s ducklings.

I also give only token amounts of food, just to keep the birds around and make them dead easy to round up and pen whenever I want to, just by going to the feed bins and calling: “Come on, little ducks!” This works like neverfail clockwork. They come running and flying from wherever they are, even if they’re out of line of sight. It does seem to me that Muscovys are quite intelligent birds, and soon learn the ropes of your place. They also seem to be great stay-at-homes, without the need of fencing. The saying is that they fly around, but they don’t fly away.

This management plan, such as it is, means that I spend next to nothing on concentrate feeds (probably about 120 kilos for the whole flock for a year) and that they get an excellently healthy free-range diet for free. I have a good deal of neglected land all around my place, nominally owned by a cement and quarry transnational. Much of it is not in any kind of commercial or agricultural use at all.

I also have a lot of comfrey plants (Bocking 14 variety for preference) from which to make high-grade poultry food from the wilted foliage. Some of these plants are on my own place, but a lot I just planted out on footpath verges, canal towpaths, and on the sides of a cycle-path nearby, where they grow like wild ‘weeds’ and are universally ignored. There are also quite a lot of self-sown, genuinely wild comfrey plants in these places too, so I have access to tons of dried feed material annually, just for the gathering. Comfrey will take six, eight, even ten cuts a year easily. Expert farmers in its Victorian heyday as a fodder plant were reportedly getting 120 tons per acre (sic!) a year of green foliage. Contains excellent natural balances of nutrients and minerals for both plants and livestock.

In practise I’ve never had to use this for bird food yet, since the flock at its present size has a super-abundance of wild forage free for the taking. So far the comfrey just goes into making mulch and comfrey-tea for feeding my raised vegetable beds. But wilted comfrey, and the meal which you get by roughly grinding it up a little when dry, is famously good animal fodder.

I reckon there are at least five benefits to my permaculture system coming from the ducks. (Thats just to mention the ones I’ve realised so far; I’m sure there are more that I haven’t noticed yet; that’s usually the way with a permaculture web) I get eggs, meat, down/feathers, high grade fertiliser from the droppings harvested in the communal night-coop, and population-control of slugs, snails, rat and mice infants, and other potentially troublesome neighbours.

Initially, I let the birds roost where they liked at night. Another of their South American oddities is that they are tree perchers, and have strong claws on their webbed feet for this purpose. (Also useful for gralloching foxes! Mature drakes have been seen to do this, successfully driving off their attackers) But it was soon clear that I was losing out on the night droppings from food brought in from their daily out-foraging, and it was just getting spread around everywhere. So now I lure them in with a bit of supper, and close them in till morning. They perch on broad, flat timber perches, above a heavy wire-mesh floor, with collection floor below.

These ducks are excellent mothers, and will raise broods and bring them home without help, if you just want to leave them to it. But to gather at least some of the eggs, just provide them with nest boxes at home, and they’ll use them willingly. You can get two broods a year easily, as well as eggs, in Spring and in early Autumn. To cut duckling mortality drastically, without too much extra work, just keep mother and chicks on grass for the first couple of weeks after hatching, in an open floored ark with half-inch mesh covering on the topsides, and slide them to a new patch of grass each day. This will need water and food feeders, and the ducklings appreciate a splash in a very shallow pan of water most days. Do watch newly-hatched ducklings, though, for waterlogging and chilling, as they seem not to be quite so waterproof as Mallard-derived chicks. This soon comes, though.