Post by exo on Apr 18, 2020 20:07:02 GMT
I feel I'm being suckered into catering for visiting Mallards !
question is : should I dissuade them, or encourage them & go for a duck family ?
I've got a 5000 litre pond (10ft x 30ft x up to 5ft deep), with koi & strong filtration/aeration etc,
but realistically it's semi-naturalised, for 2 decades there's been ridiculous amounts of frogspawn & little frogs in the garden
Over the years I've occasionally had pairs of Mallards visiting, but what a mess they make !
The pond is big enough for the Koi, but I'm unsure if it's big enough for a Mallard family as well.
This year I've got a more persistent pair of ducks (+ an annoying attendant interloping Drake)
probably because I'm acting friendly & feeding them, well I'm feeding the fish anyway but the ducks get most of it.
I've gone & set up a floating duck-house that I impulse-bought a couple of years ago,
hoping some safe sanctuary might help them stay alive
- the danger is I used to get nightly fox visits (until I blocked the hole under the fence a couple of months ago)
- one year I had a gravid duck sticking around overnight, only to find a pile of feathers one morning!
This latest pair seem particularly 'humanised', in fact while I was trying to put the duck-house in place
I had to stop while the ducks clambered on & investigated it while I was 3ft away!
(& then they got exited & started mating :rolleyes)
OK, it's entertaining, but the trouble is :
1 the hen duck might actually nest in the duck-house
- the resulting family might decimate the young frogs when they emerge.
2 it seems wild ducks can bring in parasites & pathogens that could damage the koi/frogs/ecology.
3 the mess !, water quality could plummet, even with strong filtration, possibly harming the fish.
4 the fun/aggro of feeding/caring for a family of ducks could be taxing
5 they might even eat some of the smaller fish
So am I being exploited by the 'wildlife', should I shoo the ducks away (somehow) ?
I think the Mallard is the most successful/commonest duck in the world,
but I calculate in the UK there's about 500 humans per duck,
so I feel it would a bit 'anti' to push even more 'wildlife' out of 'our space'.
Anyone with experience of this sort of thing ?
question is : should I dissuade them, or encourage them & go for a duck family ?
I've got a 5000 litre pond (10ft x 30ft x up to 5ft deep), with koi & strong filtration/aeration etc,
but realistically it's semi-naturalised, for 2 decades there's been ridiculous amounts of frogspawn & little frogs in the garden
Over the years I've occasionally had pairs of Mallards visiting, but what a mess they make !
The pond is big enough for the Koi, but I'm unsure if it's big enough for a Mallard family as well.
This year I've got a more persistent pair of ducks (+ an annoying attendant interloping Drake)
probably because I'm acting friendly & feeding them, well I'm feeding the fish anyway but the ducks get most of it.
I've gone & set up a floating duck-house that I impulse-bought a couple of years ago,
hoping some safe sanctuary might help them stay alive
- the danger is I used to get nightly fox visits (until I blocked the hole under the fence a couple of months ago)
- one year I had a gravid duck sticking around overnight, only to find a pile of feathers one morning!
This latest pair seem particularly 'humanised', in fact while I was trying to put the duck-house in place
I had to stop while the ducks clambered on & investigated it while I was 3ft away!
(& then they got exited & started mating :rolleyes)
OK, it's entertaining, but the trouble is :
1 the hen duck might actually nest in the duck-house
- the resulting family might decimate the young frogs when they emerge.
2 it seems wild ducks can bring in parasites & pathogens that could damage the koi/frogs/ecology.
3 the mess !, water quality could plummet, even with strong filtration, possibly harming the fish.
4 the fun/aggro of feeding/caring for a family of ducks could be taxing
5 they might even eat some of the smaller fish
So am I being exploited by the 'wildlife', should I shoo the ducks away (somehow) ?
I think the Mallard is the most successful/commonest duck in the world,
but I calculate in the UK there's about 500 humans per duck,
so I feel it would a bit 'anti' to push even more 'wildlife' out of 'our space'.
Anyone with experience of this sort of thing ?
