A duck is a bird that is not particularly picky about food. Due to the structural features that are the result of a long adaptation to certain conditions, the duck easily collects food both on land and from the surface of the water. She perfectly “catches” food in the water column and, most importantly, from the bottom, sometimes simply filtering the bottom silt through a special device of her beak.
Wild ducks are migratory birds, instinct pushes them to a long flight to South Asia or Africa. However, due to rather significant changes in the microclimate, in large cities, near nuclear power plants and factories, populations of wintering ducks have formed, living on the banks of non-freezing reservoirs. Birds feel great even with significant drops in air temperature. Food is also no problem. However, due to the fact that more energy is spent on maintaining body temperature than in the warm season, ducks need to be fed. How, in this case, not to harm those who remained to spend the winter next to the feathered man? Let’s try to figure it out.
What do ducks eat in nature?
The basis of the nutrition of wild ducks in nature is plant foods. Very willing ducks collect nutritious duckweed from the surface of the reservoir. Succulent aquatic plants can be considered their favorite food, available and plentiful at the bottom, surface and banks of natural reservoirs in the summer. If at the same time they come across a snail or an insect larva, the ducks do not refuse them either. Filtering water through their beaks, ducks successfully catch fish fry and tadpoles.
They are also able to pass silt through their beak, which allows them not only to select edible plant remains, but also to catch invertebrates (worms, larvae, insects). Juicy near-water vegetation is included in the diet of wild ducks. In spring, ducks eat nutritious amphibian eggs in water bodies. And in autumn, they like to make evening flights to the harvested fields, where they collect crumbled grain.
The freezing of reservoirs and the cessation of the growth of aquatic vegetation are the main reasons for the flight of wild ducks, seeking to provide themselves with their usual food.
What can be fed?
Birds left to spend the winter on a pond, for example, in a park, in fact, are often the victims of the good intentions of the visitors of this very park, who began to feed them in the summer. Birds quickly get used to the abundance of food and with the onset of autumn they do not feel changes in its nutritional value and diversity, which should be a signal to fly away.
Termination of feeding by a person in this case is completely unacceptable. Although the birds have remained wild, their behavior is still significantly different from their truly wild counterparts. Constantly receiving plentiful food, ducks lose the need to search for it. And if you stop feeding them at this time, a tragedy can occur. Even after leaving the reservoir, birds, most often, do not find an alternative to the plentiful and affordable food that they are used to.
In some reservoirs, wild ducks remain due to the fact that they do not freeze, receiving a constant influx of warm water from industrial enterprises or power plants. Even in winter, life does not stop in them. Some plants continue to grow, while fish and invertebrates remain active.
Ducks left over for the winter need to be fed to help them cope with conditions to which ducks are not generally adapted.
Wintering ducks are usually fed with mixed feed. Unlike domestic birds, whose diet is developed depending on the purposes for which they are fattened (for meat or for eggs), wild birds eat a variety of foods. This is perhaps the main difference between the diet of wild and domestic ducks.
In winter, wild ducks can be fed with a grain mixture: barley, peas, oats, corn, wheat. Oats are an excellent food for birds, nutritious, high in vegetable fats and amino acids. The most useful for adult wild birds is barley, rich in essential proteins and fiber. Wheat is no less valuable, it contains B vitamins and proteins. A high-protein product, peas, is best given crushed, for example, into halves or pea grits. Yellow varieties of corn, in addition to proteins and fiber, will enrich the body of ducks with carotene.
Of course, you can also use combined feeds for feeding wild ducks. There are even special mixtures for wild ducks, but it is quite difficult to get them due to the specifics of the product. Combined feed must be soaked before serving, as ducks will not be able to eat it dry, however, some quickly acquire the skill of soaking the granules in water, but this takes some time. However, this feed has one rather significant drawback – the high price.
Boiled vegetables are very useful: potatoes, carrots, beets. They provide enough vitamins and minerals. The lack of minerals, replenished by animal food, must be compensated, for example, by eggshells and shells. A mixture of dried herbs is eaten well (dandelion, clover, nettle, alfalfa) – this is perhaps the best source of vitamins. You can give ducks such food without crushed, they easily tear off dry leaves. Vegetables successfully replace vegetable waste unsuitable for humans.
Be sure to include proteins in the diet of ducks, boiled eggs, fish, meat or fish meal, low-fat cottage cheese can become their source. It is not necessary to peel boiled eggs from the shell, they can be crumbled right in the shell. Protein ingredients should be free of bone fragments and should be served with a grain mix. In severe cold, it is better to replace boiled or steamed grain with dry, otherwise it freezes into a mass completely inaccessible to birds.
For digestion, ducks are essential sand and small pebbles, of course, if the reservoir does not freeze, the birds will find the necessary material at its bottom, but it is still better to take care of this in advance. The particle size of the soil can reach up to 0,5 cm. Coarse river sand, special soil for birds or aquariums will do. Marble chips and pebbles can be added to the feed.
It is important to remember that abundant food is not at all useful for ducks, even in winter. A decrease in motor activity with abundant food often causes obesity and the death of birds.
Can you give bread?
Bread is the most affordable food for birds living in park ponds. Feeding them to ducks can be observed everywhere. This is done by the elderly, and mothers with children, and even couples in love.
Seeing the reaction of birds to the thrown crumbs, many show confidence in the unconditional benefits of this event for hungry city birds. However, are ducks really hungry? If feeding takes place in the summer, then, most likely, the birds are not hungry at all, and the greed with which they grab bread that has fallen on the water is caused by a simple instinct that was entrenched in the nestling period. Among ducklings, competition is especially aggravated, which is an important evolutionary factor affecting the survival of the species.
Even a well-fed bird will make every effort to grab the bread first. There is an excitement in the flock, which seems to be the result of the hunger experienced by the ducks. Often this encourages individual citizens to make regular trips to the pond in order to feed the ducks living there with a preliminary call to a store or a bakery. However, is this food good for birds?
One can unequivocally speak about the much greater harm of bread for wild ducks than about the benefits they receive. Indeed, in nature, nothing like bread exists, and the digestive system of wild birds simply cannot fully digest this food.
Bread is a combination of a large amount of carbohydrates, fats, salt, yeast. All this is not in the usual diet of birds, respectively, there are no enzymes necessary for the breakdown of all these ingredients. As a result, the bread swallowed by ducks passes through their gastrointestinal tract slowly, swelling and not allowing the birds to eat normally. Particularly dangerous are varieties of bread containing rye flour, which starts active fermentation, which poisons the body of a wild duck even more. Often, birds that have overeaten bread die from a blockage of the stomach, which they cannot cope with.
With regular feeding, birds begin to wait for the person who feeds them, not wanting to look for more suitable food for them. Often it is grain top dressing that causes the wintering of usually migratory birds. This can cause a mass death of wild ducks that are late with the departure. In winter, with the onset of cold weather, as a rule, bread feeding also stops (grandmothers do not take their grandchildren to the park, pensioners walk not far from home.
It is absolutely unacceptable to feed ducks with stale, moldy bread. Birds will swallow it with the same greed as fresh. The mold that has entered the duck body can lead the birds to death in a few days, causing the development of an incurable disease – aspergillosis. This disease is not common, but after hitting one duck in a flock, it quickly spreads to the entire flock, causing a sudden mass death of wild ducks.
Thus, regular feeding of ducks with bread is fraught with not one, but a whole tangle of dangers: from harm to health to unacceptable distortion of behavior.
Prohibited products
The set of foods that are unacceptable for feeding wild ducks is quite extensive, and the impact of the most affordable food, bread, has already been described above. Here is a list of other products that are no less dangerous for wild ducks.
Vegetables that are so useful to ducks, especially hard ones, should never be given whole. Even boiled ones are better to grind. And raw potatoes, zucchini, pumpkin, carrots, beets can cause the death of ducks adapted to the consumption of soft food.. All products must be passed through a meat grinder or kneaded in another way.
Crackers (dried bread) are dangerous no less than fresh bread, once in the stomach of a bird, they swell, and their volume increases by about three times.
Sometimes, in an effort to increase the nutritional value of the feed mixture, cereal flour is added to it. In no case should this be done, since the effect will be the same as when consuming ready-made bread.
It is also impossible to feed birds with cereals, for example, half-eaten at home. Especially if they were cooked in milk. Milk quickly turns sour and ducks, grabbing easily swallowed portions of porridge, fill the stomach with a completely uncharacteristic product, which they have no way to digest. In this case, of course, blockage of the gastrointestinal tract will not occur, but digestive disorders can have the most serious consequences.
Dangerous for birds are regular feedings of pumpkin or zucchini, which have a laxative effect. This is how calcium, which is necessary for bone tissue, is excreted from the body in large quantities. These foods can be fed in small quantities.
When giving dry herbs to ducks, it is advisable to ensure that poisonous ones do not fall among them, especially buttercup or some nightshade. In the summer, ducks are usually able to choose plant foods, but in winter they can easily swallow unwanted food.
In places where birds feed, it is necessary to regularly clean up leftover food, as stale food, especially moldy food, can cause illness and death of birds.
Diet depending on the time of year
In nature, the nutrition of ducks varies significantly according to the seasons of the year. The autumn depletion of the diet generally forces them to make annual long migrations, one of the goals of which is to provide food for migratory birds in the winter. There, in their second homeland, the birds find enough food, similar to what they consume in the summer in their nesting areas, and there is no change in their diet. Another thing is wintering ducks, which are forced to endure a rather extreme change in conditions, which necessitates a change in the amount and composition of food.
It is actually very difficult to follow natural dietary changes by providing artificial food for wintering waterfowl. However, if a number of rules are observed, it is still possible to ensure safe adaptation to the change of seasons and, accordingly, the survival of migratory birds in winter.
Winter
The most difficult season for the remaining migratory birds. The duck finds itself in conditions that are completely uncharacteristic of it. Low temperatures, ice on the surface of water bodies, reduction of normally plentiful natural food. To survive such extreme conditions, first of all, it is necessary to approximately double the nutritional value of the diet. How to achieve this? In feed mixtures, the so-called mash, the concentration of the most high-calorie elements (grain, feed, potatoes) should be increased. The animal component of the mash needs to be increased.
In summer, in a natural reservoir, birds receive a lot of animal feed, it is necessary to try to cover the reduction in natural animal proteins by feeding ducks with fish and meat meal. An excellent source of essential amino acids can be dairy products, eggs, small fish and all sorts of meat waste. In this case, the presence of bones or their fragments is unacceptable. A bone swallowed by a duck cannot be regurgitated. The bird usually dies.
Mixers are best given warm, in a semi-liquid form. The amount of feed is calculated so that its bulk is eaten in a few minutes. The food remaining in the feeders will freeze and be inaccessible to the ducks. Besides, birds should always have access to dry grain mixtures that allow them to eat almost constantly.
Spring
With the thawing of water bodies, ducks, as a rule, quickly switch to foraging in the water. If the ecosystem of the pond is close enough to the natural one, the ducks begin to feed actively already with the advent of the shores. The spring migration of ducks returning to their nesting places usually occurs after the opening of the rivers, during the spring flood. There is no shortage of food at this time for the birds that have arrived: fish spawn, amphibians spawn, and invertebrates are active.
Park ponds usually cannot provide such a varied diet, and ducks must be fed on them even in this season.
This is especially important in view of the fact that birds need to sit on nests. Females during the hatching period significantly lose weight and, if you stop feeding them with the end of winter, they may not survive this difficult period.
The composition of the spring feed mixture is practically the same as that consumed by the birds in winter, only the calorie content and the amount of food should be reduced. Ducks no longer have such an urgent need to maintain body temperature, therefore, excessively abundant feeding can cause obesity, which is detrimental to wild birds.
Summer
The most favorable season for waterfowl. Under natural conditions, ducks receive all the substances necessary for life in sufficient quantities. However, the birds that settled in the park reservoirs will still need additional feeding. During this season, it is very important to diversify the diet of ducks with the so-called seasonal feeds.
It is necessary to add herbs to the mash (nettle, clover, alfalfa and others) – this will increase the content of vitamins and fiber.
Autumn
For migratory birds, this is a very important time. Abundant feeding is designed to provide sufficient energy for long-distance migration. It is very difficult to artificially create a transition from plentiful feeding to meager, however, it is still possible. A properly selected diet can encourage ducks to leave the pond at the same time as their counterparts living in natural conditions.
In practice, most often, it is not possible to guess the timing of the decrease in the abundance of food, and ducks can again miss the time of departure. In this case, it is necessary to prepare them for the coming winter, not reducing, but, on the contrary, increasing the calorie content of feed.
See the following video for feeding wild ducks.
