A common homestead question is “Can chickens and ducks live together?”. The answer is “Yes, but…”.
If you have all girl ducks, then no problem. If you have boy ducks (drakes) and a good boy-girl ratio (about 1 to 6), then also no problem. The problem occurs when the drakes don’t have enough girls, or worse yet, when you have only drakes. Here’s why.
Most male birds don’t have typical male genitalia. In fact, of the 10,000 species of birds, only 3% of the males have a penis. That’s right, ducks are in that 3%, along with geese, swans, ostriches, emus, and several others that you probably wouldn’t recognize. Drakes are highly sexual, and when they don’t have enough duck girlfriends, they turn their attentions to chickens.
A drake’s penis can expand to 8 inches, and it’s a corkscrew shape. Since roosters have no penis, hens aren’t built for duck love. After repeated duck-chicken sex, a couple of things can happen. One, the drake can rupture the hen’s large intestine or oviduct, causing sepsis and death. Or more likely, the hen’s intestine or oviduct will be pulled out, and because it is irritated and inflamed, it will not return inside her. This will also result in death, although slower.
We had a young drake that was dropped off last summer. He was a sweet drake and we even gave him a name. Even though he had plenty of girl ducks to choose from, his passions were for the chickens. Before we figured out what was happening, two hens were dead and a third had to be put down. We could not break his desire for chickens, so our only option was to dispatch him.
Our advice: Keep your duck boy-girl ratio in check, and they can coexist with chickens.
You might be thinking, if a rooster has no penis, how do chickens (and the 97% of other bird species) make babies? Both males and females only have one hole in back, called a cloaca, or vent. Hens poop, lay eggs, and mate with the same hole. When they mate, males and females touch cloacae (yes, that’s a real word), and fluid transfer occurs. For a chicken, the entire act is 5 seconds of positioning, and a half second of actual sex. The hen can retain sperm for up to a month, meaning she can easily lay an entire clutch of fertilized eggs from one mating.
So there’s half of the “Birds and Bees” lesson. Bee sex isn’t nearly as exciting. Spoiler alert: the boy bee dies!