Ice Advice

Hi,

Does anyone have any advice on ways to prevent the buildup of ice around the duck's watering areas. I keep my ducks (Campbells & Runner) and geese (Pilgrims) in a shed at night and let them out on days when the weather is not too frightful. I give them water twice a day in plastic buckets hung on the wall and have shallow boxes with screen over the top and a drain through the floor to catch most of the splashed water.

This setup was working fine until we went into the deep freeze around Christmas and it's been -10 to -20C since. Now the splash trays are frozen so they don't drain and are full of ice. The walls around the bucket are so thick with ice it's hard to get the new buckets back on the hooks. From all the slpashing and bathing activity at the buckets, I now have spreading glaciers a few inches thick.

Would covering the buckets with a lid with a hole cut in it help to reduce the splashing or would the ducks & geese likely shy away from such an arrangement?

Any thoughts most appreciated.

I get the ice build up too and we just chop away as need with a heavy duty ice chopper tool.
I just deal with it and keeping thinking SPRING!

Since I have no drains in my barn floor (concrete), I keep lots of straw bedding around the waterin' hole and find that it's not difficult to scrape and remove the frozen straw and replace it every couple of days -- even when it was below 0. The biggest problem for me was that I was using a heated bucket for the geese and every time they'd splash in it, the ice would build up around the rim and handle so you couldn't move the handle to change the water. I decided that since they wouldn't benefit from the heated bucket as much as my other livestock does, I'd go back to rubber buckets which I stomp out and refill a couple of times a day. Of course, by morning, they only have a head-size hole in the ice, and 4 inches of ice buildup around the inside walls of the bucket!

Its a pain in the butt isn't it?