Pure verses a mixed breed duck

[ambrose]

Transparency. As long as no duck is knowingly mislabled, sounds fair to me.

With breeds of very low populations I guess I could see some cringing. But is mixing them up any worse than not breeding them at all?

 

[Kimmyh51]

2. As a result of the limited gene pool, you're apt to see more undesirable traits and even hereditary diseases show up. When you outcross, the ducks you get are often with different genetics and therefore less chance of "fatal genes" cropping up.

Sorry to hijack this older thread but..

I have a number of ducks. Of the first 8 I got about 20 months ago, there was a purebred khaki Campbell male and female. The rest were hatched out by the female or one of her ducklings, but none appeared to be pure khaki Campbell. I have since added other non related,birds, however none are purebred khaki Campbell. There are some crosses, and also a number of ducks I suspect are appleyard, and some runner x. So of the ducks i have not hatched here , only the two of the initial 8 are pure khaki Campbell.

After one season of allowing them all to hatch ducklings with whoever they choose to mate with (as I wanted more birds) only 2 of the 16 ducklings hatched from various small clutches appeared to possibly be purebred. One female,and one drake.
Because the girls from the 8 ducks I started with usually lay in shared nests, I don't know who fathered them or who laid the eggs for sure. The drake is the only drake out of 9 that have hatched from 3 maybe 4 potential fathers who has the khaki Campbell colouring. Most have coloring more like a mallard, and one pekin (which is interesting as I only had one pekin drake, no pekin girls)

So this year I put the male and female together for a couple of weeks in a run separate from all the other ducks and put the 8 resulting eggs under two different broody ducks who were sitting in two different locations. The broodys were siblings. Other siblings from the same clutch as those two, have successfully hatched ducklings this season.
Anyway 7 of those eggs developed and were alive until hatching. However none of them hatched alive, most died without pipping internally, one pipped internally then died without pipping externally and one pipped externally then died. When I looked at some after they died, I found large, mushy but otherwise normally and fully formed ducklings inside. All appeared to develop normally and were quite active when candledmat 26-28 days. There were no rotten eggs in the nests.
I am wondering if maybe this is the result of a fatal gene? Or would that have caused the ducklings to die much earlier in the process? Never had every single egg (bar one that either wasn't fertile or died very early on) laid in a clutch go to 28 days then die

The male is very prolific in his mating attempts with the females. Yes all drakes are,but he's one of the worst, and also has been the alpha drake, and has often been selected as preferred mate by a number of females, all of who have laid and hatched healthy ducklings that appear to have been fathered by other drakes... I cannot be certain any eggs the female hS laid have hatched due to the shared nests, nor can I be certain any eggs fathered by the pure make (with x bred females or females for other breeds) have hatched though my gut tells me the drake thwt hatched last season was fathered by the pure khaki campbel drake.

But clearly both ducks are fertile as the eggs laid when they were caged separate from other birds were all fertile except maybe one.

Oh I don't have any history on the purebred khaki campbells except the ppl who gave them to me purchased them as pure. So no idea if they are related, although they were purchased together from the same place as far as I know.