Is bread bad for ducks?

Is bread really bad for ducks? Or is it just a conspiracy to sell you duck food products?

Well, in short, a small amount of bread isn’t going to be poisonous or otherwise toxic for the ducks, swans and geese at your local duck pond.

However, “not poisonous” doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for them to be eating and “a small amount” is almost impossible to adhere to, because who knows how many people will be along to feed the ducks as well as you?!

The real problem with bread is the quantity of it offered to ducks. Just as it wouldn’t be good for you if you just ate bread all the time, it’s not good for the ducks if that’s what they’re eating most of the time. They miss out on the nutrients that help to keep them in tip top quacking condition.

At this point, some people will get very cross and say/shout/rant that “people have fed bread to the ducks for years and it did no harm”, but, actually, it has only been in relatively recent times that bread has been cheap enough that people will buy a whole loaf on their way to the duck pond just to feed to the ducks.

In many places across the UK, the bread feeding situation has gone way beyond a few people occasionally offering a few stale pieces of bread to the ducks. Whole loaves are thrown into ponds, lakes, rivers and canals by successive duck feeders.

The ducks and their waterfowl friends end up eating a bread-heavy low nutrition diet and what they don’t eat ends up polluting the water or littering the waterside. It’s a situation that has seen duck feeding banned in several places!

This is all completely unnecessary as there are more nutritious alternatives to bread that don’t have to cost any more than bread – debunking the great conspiracy theories about this advice – and not overfeeding the ducks isn’t difficult to do.

Ducks would get by on their own if there were no people around, so if we’re going to visit their world and enjoy their quacking, splashing and waddling – and keep the age old joy of going to feed the ducks alive for all – we can and should do better for them than dumping low nutrition bread on mass into their watery homes.

So please consider these alternatives to bread and these tips to feed wild ducks responsibly.

“Use your head, there are better things for ducks than bread”