Ducks anyone?

[cazinski]

I've been toying with the idea of keeping chickens for ages now, and as we are moving somewhere a lot more rural and with land-I'm finally going to get around to doing it!
Anyway, I have been doing a bit of research/nosying around at what I'll need to do, get prepared etc and I came across a uk website that had ducklings for sale and had lots of interesting info on keeping ducks.
Now I've started wondering if ducks would be a more fun venture, we love duck eggs and find ducks in general lovely birds.

Does anyone else keep ducks? If so, would love a bit of general advice...or should I just stick to the chickens??

We have 3 ducks only. they are what can be called intermittant egg layers and mine tend to just leave them around. what about guinea fowl ( bit noisy) turkeys or something exotic - quails. if you are doing it for a bit of fun then you can affort to experiment.!

I do love ducks and had them as a child. Noisy, nosy and a lot of fun. You have to keep 'em safe from foxes - just like chickens and they HAVE to have water. Perfect set up for ducks is of course a duck pond with an island in the middle. I think they are more work - they are certainly messier.

I do think they are fantastic though. If I had more land I would definitely keep them..

Ducks are fantastic, we have/had three, two Aylesbury girls and a mix and match drake called Duke. They are big for ducks and have the most amazing personalities, I could sit in the kitchen all day and watch them pootle about, plus no slugs or snails anymore. There is a big but though, they are nosy and destructive and having been completely free range in our back garden have learnt to scale a 10 foot vertical bank and go on the rampage around the village, digging holes in peoples lawns. They always come back for a drink of water and swim but people don't like holes in their lawn . They have been rehoused on the village pond in the charge of the local miller as to keep them here we had to fence them in quite a lot and it made me too sad to see them caged. Probably not such a problem with smaller breed though. I've only been to visit them about 5 times today .

we have indian runners. gorgeous! One v ill at moment. He'll either be ok or die in the night. they need water to wash their faces and clean up, but not a pond.

We've had a few ducks over the years, the last ones being two Indian Runners which we had for 5 years before they were killed by a fox last week IRs and Khaki Campbells are fantastic layers in my experience - younger ducks will lay pretty much continuously from February to October, rarely missing a day. Even our slightly elderly lady was laying a good 5 or 6 a week.

We now have two apricot IRs and 7 eggs in the incubator from our breeding pair who were killed last week. I can't wait, got everything crossed that they hatch!

Are they very noisy?

I have been thinking of getting some ex battery hens and came across some ducks on a site.

Dont want to annoy my neighbours!