Duck house for Welsh Harlequins

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FireFury

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We're just about to start keeping a pair of Welsh Harlequin ducks, having nor kept fowl or poultry before. We don't have a huge amount of space, so for this reason I'm planning on building a duck house above a pond, with a ramp leading up to it. I'm looking for advice on the design of the duck house: what is the minimum width I should be making the door and ramp, and how steep a ramp would the ducks be happy with?

Many thanks.
 
Hi and welcome to the forum and to duck keeping!
The ramp should be as gently sloped as possible as ducks are not great with ramps. Grip is also really important, I use fine plastic garden mesh stapled onto any ramps.
The door needs to be at least duck head height and at least 30cm wide, ramps should also be 30cm wide at least, they are very clumsy and tend to fall off the side of ramps.
The pond needs to have a shallow part just a couple of inches deep and also feature a gentle slope access in and out onto dry land. They will also need a grass/turf area as they can't spend all day on the water (i'm sure you already realise this). They usually spend the day bathing, preening, snoozing, foraging. They don't spend a huge amount of time swimming. They will use deep water to bathe, shallow water to preen and they like to sleep and eat on land.
zo
x
 
Thanks for the reply - we've got a lawn that's never been in great condition next to our veg garden, so the plan is to dig a small pond in the corner of that lawn and build a duck house above it, so they'll have access to the pond and the lawn (which I'm fully expecting to get trashed!)

I've seen mixed opinions on whether we can expect them to munch the veg in the veg garden or not, but I'm going to put a removable fence between the lawn and the veg so we can see how that goes. The entire garden has high fences around it anyway, so whilst they might get somewhere we don't particularly want them to go, they aren't going to escape entirely. :)
 
Here's the finished duck house, complete with ducks (Electra and Maia) who are now 10 weeks old. Took them a couple of weeks to get used to the ramp, but they now put themselves to bed at dusk every day. The pond is still to come, but will be under the duck house.
 

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A very nice set up you have. 2 things I would just like to mention, 1 - when the ducks getter bigger and more inquisitive that small retaining fence you have will almost certainly be breached. And the 2nd thing, living in a built up area as it looks like you do, 1 thing that I suffer from is neighbours cats, and you want to consider the placement of the duck house as you may find neighbouring cats walking along the fence and sitting on top of the duck house which in tern will scare the ducks. If you don't suffer from cats then great.
 
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