Hi TTarrel wrote:Hey Emord, I missed this reply earlier. Do you have a body of water for your ducks and geese? Also, do they stay put or fly off occasionally?emordnilap wrote:nexus wrote:and it can vary from DODGY to DODGY.
We have a few geese and ducks. Both of those birds keep most vegetation down, if for no other reason they trample it to death!
The geese are brilliant at keeping grass down - when confined to a particular area - and providing it isn't too long or tough to start with. Ideally, flocks of geese would be shared amongst near neighbours who wanted to to clear specify patches of ground.
For us, these birds are pets really, it's great having life around the place. The eggs get given to workmates or a dog or two might get them.
They're easy to look after, ducks spending a lot of time looking for insects (they adore slugs!) and the geese graze away happily for hours - a few layers pellets fill them up so it's not expensive to keep them.
Just another option.
We put in a large pond as a feature and to encourage frogs. Keep ducks out of it! They eat anything and everything. They're let in before the frogspawn season but anything growing during the summer would be devoured.
We have a smaller pond I don't mind them going in but they absolutely love the larger one, so do the geese. We have a bath for them in their compound plus lots of large water holders refilled with rainwater but they prefer the pond.
I have to say, I love to see them on the pond, their appetite notwithstanding. They have what looks like, from a human perspective, great fun getting bathed and diving and generally being busy.
On a day-to-day basis, they're restricted to a kind of compound - builders' fencing, about sixteen lengths of it, which is moved around as they go their merry way, making a hames of the land inside it.
They will fly over anything up to pallet height.These are domesticated breeds and knows which side their bread's margerined so don't fly away. Indeed, they're great for making towards their little compound as dusk falls.
A friend who has a massive pond with an island in the middle colonised it with wild ducks who come and go as they please, but they do regard the island as home.
We had a young guillemot visit us recently. Very unusual. We're 25 miles from any cliffs, as the gillie flies! He must have been blown inland. He was tame and it was really nice for him to share our home for a few days.