Don’t Give Ducks Bread (Ever)!

The city of Reykjavík is encouraging people to not feed bread to ducks at the Tjörnin pond this summer. In fact, giving ducks bread is a bad idea any season of the year.

According to an announcement from the city, residents and visitors alike are advised not to feed bread to ducks this summer. This is on account of the fact that ducks nest and lay their eggs during this season. Feeding ducks bread attracts seagulls, who in turn can feast on duck eggs and ducklings.

Apart from this point, it is a bad idea to feed bread to ducks for many other reasons, too.

For one, bread provides little to no nutritional value to ducks. It also causes them to defecate a lot more, which brings with it its own crop of potential disease threats, such as aspergillosis. This disease, often fatal, can wipe out whole populations of ducks.

If you do want to feed our web-footed friends, you can safely offer them such safe and nutritional treats as grapes cut in half, cracked corn, thawed peas or – if you can find it – duck feed pellets.