ancona ducks not a tue breed??? no one wants to answer this?

[prov31gal]

see, i feel like it all boils down to this....all ducks.......are ducks......they all came from the origional generic duck what ever that was. if they can produce offspring, and they can, then they are just a different variation of the same animal. see, all dog breeds can produce offspring, though many look very very different, so origionally you had a generic dog, and these different kinds we have are just variations of the same animal. so when people say , oh this isnt a "true" breed, or something like that , i feel they are missing a crutial point, that none , no matter how old are their own distinct true breed, they all came from the origional generic duck, they are just mixes of different physical charachteristics that were desireable to someone along the line.
having said all that, im not against different breeds of duck or anything like that, i like certain ones, and dont like others, but lets not get all hung up on whats a true breed and whats not and whats just a variation, and what is a pure breed.

 

[TheBoonducks]

Quote:
I have a bunch of audio from Dave that will help to clear this up, they are not Magpies, Dave brought back a single male and them another pair from the UK. We have all of Daves Anconas and are working to help further this breed. - Evan from Boondockers Farm

 

[kswaterfowl]

I can only speculate on this because we bred them for a number of years, but eventually gave them up because we wanted to concentrate on "in the Standard breeds". But I think they ARE an individual breed, but they are going to be next to impossible to get accepted by the Standard committee. The random markings are one thing, but there is such a range in size and shape in them as well that it is hard to pick which is correct and breed towards that. Personally I feel they are a medium class duck, but I've seen birds that would compete with light class birds as well as others that were huge! We bred them from 2001-2007/8 and although they were nice layers, we showed them and only once had other birds to compete against besides our own. We had the only 4 Anconas at the '06 Crossroads National, and if you look in the Storey's Guide to breeds book by Mrs. Damerow, that Ancona pictured is ours. She's a black and white hen, a little on the light-weight side, but her name was Marigold. Probably one of the only ones that we had that ever fit what was the "working" breed Standard at the time.
Just my two cents.

In the first picture she is also the hen 5th from the right. The older she got the more she got white feathers. By the end she was more white than anything else. Layed well though. We had blacks, blues, chocolates, silvers, one true Lavendar, a couple of tri-colors and some pencilleds, pencilled only when were first started, those were culled fairly early on in our program.