CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Many families across our community may love to stop and visit a local duck pond and feed the ducks bread.
However, that bread just might do more harm than good.
Workers with the Oso Bay Wetlands Preserve do their best to educate the public about not feeding the ducks bread.
For many ducks, birds, to even turtles, Lakeview Park is considered home and when it’s time to eat, workers with the Oso Bay Wetlands Preserve advise visitors not to have bread on the menu.
“Bread is pretty processed also all of us have seen bread spread in water, so it’s going to do that in a ducks belly and it doesn’t give them a lot of good nutrition so they’re eating the spread thinking it’s delicious just like we do but it’s going to swell in their stomach and not leave room for the things they should be eating,” said Preserve Manager Oso Bay Wetlands Preserve.
Jose says when ducks consume too much bread they can develop an “angel wing” where the wings of the duck grown the wrong way affecting the feathers too, causing birds not to fly.
“Well it’s very important for just you know the lives of the animals and everything else to make sure that you don’t feed them something that can hurt them,” said duck pond visitor Gina Bryant.
Since COVID-19 Gina and her husband Daniel Bryant started coming to Lakeview Park more often. The couple says they do not feed the ducks bread because of the harm it can cause.
“At the beginning, we didn’t know either, so once we found out what was good and we saw another gentleman out here with this big sack of corn so we started doing that,” said Bryant.
Staff with the Oso Bay Wetlands Preserve say instead of bread you can feed the ducks other foods such as:
- Birdseed
- Duck Pellet
- Corn
- Oats
- Cut Grapes
- Berries
- Peas
- Veggie scraps
- Worms
“Again just those polite things when how you would want people to treat you in your space remembering that they live here in our community too and being considerate to them,” said Jose.
However, if you do feed the ducks bread you will not be fined or penalized, workers with the preserve say these are things that can help protect the life of these ducks.
