It’s only a matter of time before a chicken lover decides it’s time to add a duck, or five, to the flock. With their adorable good looks and humorous farm antics, ducks are tough to resist. It quickly becomes a homesteading staple raising chickens and ducks together.
It has been said that ducks are the new chickens, and it isn’t hard to see why.
Ducks lay beautiful, large eggs all year and tend to be friendlier than chickens, making them fun family pets. I remember our first two ducks, they were quick to become attached to the children, and they would not separate.
If they lost sight, they would cry after them until the little ones would return. They grew out of the separation anxiety, but it left an imprint of how friendly and attached ducks can be.
While you can raise chickens and ducks together, there are certain differences that any owner should take into consideration when adding new fowl to their flock.
Keeping chickens and ducks together requires a little bit of tweaking to coops and equipment.
Chickens and Ducks Have Different Water Needs
Ducks naturally go hand-in-hand with water, but it’s possible to keep ducks without a pond or small pool. Make sure to read our duck breeds guide to see compatibility.
Although they will most likely set out to find one elsewhere, they love to splash, throw water around, and generally make a muddy mess.
But ducks won’t be like fish out of the water if they don’t have a kiddie pool of their own.
Chickens, on the other hand, prefer to stay dry at all costs.
Unlike ducks, chickens do not have waterproof feathers that keep them dry and warm. So, if a chicken gets unnecessarily wet, it can become chilled or sick.
Ducks have oil glands that are activated when they preen their feathers. This oil keeps their feathers waterproof. To observe this, you can follow these instructions.
Interestingly, a duck’s love of water isn’t just because they love to swim. Chickens obviously need hydration, but ducks need water for two other reasons:
Water Needs Compared:
1) Ducks use water to help aid in digestion – ducks will take a bite of food and swish it around with water. This makes it much easier for them to digest. Chickens, on the other hand, need the grit to digest their food. Both use external elements to aid in digestion.
2) Ducks use water to clean their eyes and nostrils. A duck can get quite dirty, and buildup can form in its nose and eyes. They naturally know how to clean up by dunking their head in the water to clear away the gunk.
This is all fine and dandy, but it also means that ducks love to make a mess, so keeping waterers out of the coop will ensure that the area used for sleeping, protection, and nesting will remain clean and dry.
A dirty, humid, enclosed space is bacteria’s favorite place to live and thrive. For this reason, I opt to keep all waterers for chickens and ducks outside the coop.
There are special waterers that you can also look into that keep themselves clean by design.
Additionally, ducks cannot easily use most water fonts that were made for chickens.
Their cute bills are much larger than a duck’s beak, and thus they may outgrow little founts as they mature.
Additionally, a small kiddie pool will meet the ducks’ needs well enough.
While chickens will drink from, and maybe even wade around, the pool on a hot day, they most likely will not be doing cannonballs.
Chicken and Duck Food
Luckily chickens and ducks can eat the same kind of feed as adults.
However, chicks and ducklings can only eat the same type of starter feed if it is unmedicated.
Because ducks tend to eat much more and faster than chickens, they can consume too much of the medicated feed and become sick.
Ducklings should have access to additional niacin. You can easily accomplish this by adding brewer’s yeast to the food dish.
To avoid any issues with overfeeding, it is often easier to keep young birds in separate brooders. Read our duck feeding guide here for duck-specific feed advice.
In addition, you should keep different types of feeding bowls for the chickens and ducks. Once again, a duck will have a harder time fitting its bill into the feeding dishes most commonly used for chickens.
When they are small, this isn’t as big of a problem as when they are older. I learned that ducks are very sloppy and messy eaters, and it just does not mix well with chicken feeders.
You can experiment on your own, but I always recommend starting with separate feeders.
Happily, chickens and ducks enjoy the same kinds of treats. Since they are both omnivorous animals, they like to eat plant matter and meat morsels. Yum!
The Coop for Chicken and Ducks
For the most part, chickens and ducks don’t mind sharing a room at night. Ducks tend to be chatty Cathys at night, and this may disturb the chickens’ beauty sleep.
Ducks are like a playmate at a sleepover that won’t turn in for the night, giggling and playing while everyone else wants to get some sleep.
It will work, but if chickens could talk, they would probably tell their owners how annoying their playmates are at night.
Chickens and ducks won’t roost together because ducks prefer to nest on the ground, while chickens enjoy perching as far off the ground as possible.
Nesting material for ducks is just as important as a perch is for chickens.
Chicken and Ducks Behavior Concerns
Generally, chickens and ducks are considered acquaintances rather than friends. They may share some of the same spaces.
They will most likely go their separate ways during the day if given the opportunity. Unlike chickens, ducks do not place much of an emphasis on pecking orders.
Ducks may squabble a bit and move on. Chickens seemingly obsess over who is at the top. So, it is true that chickens tend to be a bit more aggressive than ducks toward one another.
This can be dangerous for a duck who is not interested in establishing a pecking order. A Chicken’s beak and talons are sharp and can damage a duck that is less equipped to battle with such a foe.
Roosters and Drakes
If they were raised together, it is possible to keep a rooster and a drake together in the same flock.
Otherwise, they may become aggressive toward each other. This will all depend on the temperament of the two males.
Keeping a drake without a rooster could be deadly to chicken hens due to the aggressive nature and anatomy of a drake.
Drakes can easily injure a chicken hen; therefore, keeping a protective rooster would be beneficial.
Typically, having enough hens around for everyone will mean there is less to fight about. The more, the merrier!
Health Issues
Chickens and ducks are plagued with their fair share of diseases and health concerns, but ducks tend to be quite hardy.
Amazingly, they have a higher body temperature than chickens, preventing external parasites, like mites, from infesting ducks, thus fewer ways to contract diseases.
Generally speaking, the best way to keep any flock healthy is to keep it clean. Since ducks love to make a mess, feeders, waterers, and even bedding can become perfect places for bacteria to thrive.
It is essential to keep living quarters clean.
Final Thoughts
Adding ducks to a flock of chickens can be an exciting new adventure for any chicken owner and vice-versa.
Ducks and chickens can coexist peacefully if given adequate space, with a few tweaks here and there.
Generally speaking, they will probably go their separate ways once the coop door opens in the morning.
I have 2 pet ducks and 2 pet chickens. The ducks came first. The ducks don’t car for the chickens. Ducks rule the roost, lol.
Both duck/chicken girls did share the same nest to lay their eggs in and both decided to sit on each others eggs, funny to watch.
Great article really informative and helpful, we ahve people keeping both bantam chickens and ducks together so this was really usefull.
Thank you for writing.
I have recently added 2 ducks (now almost 4 months old) to my flock of 6 chickens (2 years old). I kept them in separate runs (connected but divided by a fence) for about 7 weeks, with daily supervised visit and just moved them in together about 5 days ago. I am having trouble with 3 of the chickens chasing the ducks. Their run is about 600 square feet and the building is about 192 square feet. The biggest issue is that my husband and I work the night shift and this time of year it is still daylight when I have to lock them up for the night before we leave for work…about and hour and a half before the chickens go to roost. I am afraid to lock them all up together as the ducks are less able to get away (I am putting them in a large dog crate inside the building, and I hate doing that to them). Any advice on how to stop the “bullying”? Or am I overreacting? I am so worried one of the ducks will end up getting hurt. I love my chickens but they are such mean girls.
This is called the pecking order, it is a natural process. More info here https://www.thehappychickencoop.com/the-pecking-order/
Make sure you go through the correct introduction with them. Refer to this article. https://www.thehappychickencoop.com/how-to-introduce-new-chickens-to-your-existing-flock/
Claire
I have two ducks and 8 chickens grew up together as babies yesterday the male duck attacked one of the chickens so severely the head and neck bloody the chicken is barely alive I am not sure what set this off I was at work got home found the chicken in the middle of my cedar tree was shocked when I got it out put it down and the duck started chasing it and attacked it I beat off the duck Beware
We have 40 ducks and 60 chickens. They all get along pretty well. It’s entertaining when a chicken sits on duck eggs and raises the ducks as her own. They are eggcellent mothers but they basically have a heart attack the first time their ducklings want to go in the water and the mother hen is bawking at the shore begging for them to come out, all the while the ducklings are having the time of their lives! Once a rooster was convinced it was a drake and slept with the ducks and watched over them everywhere they went with care.
That’s awesome!
My female duck is sitting on her nest but everyone tells me I have to put the male somewhere else because he will kill the ducklings when they are born do I need to do this?
We just rescued what we believed to be 1.5 month old female Khaki Campbell duck and are in the process of integrating her with our mixed flock (6 sussex, 6 rhode islands, 3 leghorns) we have two roosters, one leghorn and one rhode island. Right now they are living in separate pens and free range them together in our garden about an hour a day. It seems that she has asserted herself as the top of the flock! I am a bit concerned though as it seems my hens, and even the roosters are a bit afraid of her. I know chickens typically have a pecking order but I didn’t know ducks did this as well. Is this something normal or should we be concerned?
A young polish buff rooster wandered up to my front yard this AM. We keep a small flock of all female ducks, and live on the edge of a large wooded area, so we scooped him up and put him in our yard. We didn’t want him to get eaten in the woods!!
The ducks don’t seem bothered by him and vice versa. We are trying to find him owners.
If we can’t find his owners, would it be ok to transition him into hanging out with our ducks? Would he hurt them?
We’ve created “temporary rooster housing” to keep them separate at night.
We have 2 ducks and 5 chickens all raised together . We don’t know any of the sexes because we bought them at a local feed store . We have 2 reddish big chickens , the 2 ducks are attacking 1 of them chasing it around the yard .my question is are the 2 ducks trying to kill it or possibly mate with it ? This has not been the normal behavior only recently started . The poor chicken has to hide in the roost area to stay away from the ducks .
I have a duck that was hatched by 2 of my hens. She finally learned to swim with my other 2 ducks but often prefers to hang our with her chicken moms. I just wanted to say that the chickens have a 4 tier roost that they sleep on at night. She sleeps on the top tier with the chickens and the other 2 ducks sleep on the floor. It is the funniest thing to open the coop in the morning and see her jumping down from the roost with the girls.
We got 4 ducks and 11 chickens at the same time from same farm. Plus a very young rooster. 3 hylines chickens must be a bit older as they are laying already, others don’t. And they are cheeky buggers. They are always running to us, peck us, jump on my back when i bend over to feed/clean, and can be easily cuddled. Rest chickens are running away from us. Ducks are even more shy. So these 3 seem to be bullying everybody including ducks and a rooster. Thankfully not much physical attacks, but plenty of intimidation. I worry that ducks don’t get enough to eat as they are easily frightened by chickens. I have different feeders, but chickens are all over everything and ducks are to shy to insist. Also, when i try to throw treats to ducks – they just running away instead of grabbing treats. And then chickens obviously get there.
Do you think bird will outgrow these behaviour and ducks will mature enough to answer? Or to get friendly with us at least? We had them for 1.5 weeks. Thought they will settle by now.