An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Raising Backyard Ducks

Move over chickens - ducks are joining the backyard flock! This introductory guide is the provides all the information beginners need to raise ducks successfully in the yard or on a small homestead or farm. Ducks are quickly gaining on chickens as popular animals for the backyard homestead or small farm. They are friendly, productive, good at eating pests, remarkably healthy, and easier to raise than chickens in many ways. Plus, they are exceptionally adorable! This accessible introductory guide features original photography tracking the growth and care of a small flock of backyard ducks, and addresses everything the beginner duck keeper needs to know to be successful, including breed selection, housing, feeding, health care, understanding behaviour, and egg and meat production. AUTHOR: Gail Damerow has written extensively on raising chickens and other livestock, growing fruits and vegetables, and related rural know-how in more than a dozen books, including What's Killing My Chickens? and the best-selling Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, The Chicken Encyclopedia, The Chicken Health Handbook, and Hatching & Brooding Your Own Chicks. Damerow is a contributor to Chickens and Hobby Farms magazines and a regular blogger for Cackle Hatchery. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, where they operate a family farm with poultry and dairy goats, a sizable garden, and a small orchard. SELLING POINTS: . Growing in popularity. Ducks have been gaining popularity with backyard homesteaders in recent years as an alternative to chickens. Ducks have a number of advantages over chickens: they are generally healthier, hardier (both more cold-hardy and more heat-tolerant), easier on the landscape, better at controlling pests, less likely to be broody (depending on the breed), less bullying to one another, and capable of laying into a fifth or sixth season . Authoritative authorship. Author Gail Damerow has stellar authority as a poultry expert (author of the best-selling Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, The Chicken Health Handbook, and The Chicken Encyclopedia), and she has also raised ducks for many years