What ducks actually need water for
The pond question is really a health question. Ducks must be able to submerge their whole head: they blow out their nostrils underwater and rinse their eyes, and a duck who can only sip from a drinker ends up with clogged nostrils and sore, foamy eyes. Beyond head-dipping, they love to bathe properly, splash, and dabble along a waterline, and swimming is exercise and entertainment for them. But none of that requires a permanent pond. It requires clean-enough water, deep enough for a full head dunk and ideally a body splash, available through the day. A rigid paddling pool or a sunken stock tank delivers all of it in a back garden.
Setting up a pool that works
Choose the sturdiest pool you can — thin inflatable sides do not survive duck claws and enthusiasm — and site it on level ground you do not mind being wet, because the splash zone around a duck pool is a permanent mud kitchen. Access is the detail that makes or breaks it: ducks are clumsy climbers, so build a ramp or a couple of broad steps up and in, and a way out on the inside too, such as a stack of bricks or a submerged step, so a duck can always exit where she entered. Shallow shelves at one end let smaller or older birds bathe without swimming, and placing the pool in partial shade keeps summer water from turning green by lunchtime.
The honest downside: water quality and mud
Ducks treat any water as a toilet, a food bowl and a bath simultaneously, so pool water fouls fast — in warm weather, daily emptying is realistic, and twice daily is not unusual for a busy little pool. A pond hides this problem rather than solving it: an unfiltered backyard pond becomes the same soup with worse access for cleaning, plus a liner or muddy bank the ducks will excavate. Manage the splash zone with gravel or slabs around the pool, move the pool around the run if the ground allows, and tip spent water onto plants that appreciate it rather than letting it pool by the gate. If emptying daily sounds like the obstacle, it is worth knowing now, because that chore is the true cost of ducks.
When a pond genuinely earns its place
A pond comes into its own for larger flocks on more land, where a properly sized, planted pond with a gravel margin gives many birds room to swim without crowding a small pool, and where a pump or natural flow helps water quality. Even then it supplements rather than replaces drinking water, and banks must be graded so ducks can climb out. For the typical backyard handful of ducks, though, the pool wins on cleanliness, safety for ducklings — who can chill or drown in deep water and should only swim supervised in shallows — and sheer practicality.
The daily empty, scrub and refill is exactly the sort of chore that slips when two people each think the other did it. Putting it on the rota in KinsLe Care Teams, assigned to whoever is on duck duty that day and marked complete with a timestamp, keeps the water as clean as the ducks deserve.