Ancona Ducks

[Rosepath Garden]

With three young boys in the house the ducklings were handled every day.
When I feed in the morning the boys get to pet all the ducks while they eat.
So my three drakes are very sweet to humans. I hope having a three to five ratio will be ok as they mature.
I already sold two drakes I would really like to keep the eight ducks.

The saxony walks through our legs and nibbles playfully at anyone she thinks might have more food.

 

[m.kitchengirl]

Rosepath, where in NH are you? I just moved to Maine from Rye, NH back in June. Lived all over the seacoast for the last 10 years, and worked at a lot of restaurants, too.

Well, a little update on my naughty boy.
I want to thank you all again for your help & input with him. It has helped a lot.
I am proud to say I am NOT afraid of my drake, but am afraid for my chickens where he is concerned. So far split shifts in the yard have kept that problem under control, though the chickens LOVE to "free range" right by the duck house door the entire time they are out.
He tried one more day to step to me, it is annoying, but not scary. It is annoying because I have spent SO MANY HOURS with these silly things, I bring them buckets of warm water before I leave for work in the morning, so they can splash in a hot tub while I bust my behind to pay the feed bill. The last time he ran at me I held him firmly on the ground for several minutes & then paraded him around the yard. Finally I put him in a time out in the pen I have for my broody chickens & let everyone out to come stand around his solo pen & demoralize him further.
He has been doing his deep bow when I come out, but runs behind his hay bale when I open the door with food.
A HUGE improvement, but I don't feel comfortable breeding him, so he will be moving on.
I think I found a large farm (my CSA & a woman I work with making products for her to sell at market -jams, preserves, pickles, and cured meats) that will take him on. She has SO MANY ducks, geese, turkeys, etc that I think he will be taken down a few rungs. If he doesn't fit in, I'll probably wind up making proscuitto out of him, and I won't even have to know.
I just need to get over the guilt of "giving up" on him. I am such a sucker for rescues, and critters with "troubled pasts", and I need to stop feeling so bad. ... Right...?

 

[toadbriar]

He might just not be cut out to be a small-flock-with-chickens guy. It's no sin for you to not be the perfect match for every critter that comes along! Maybe he's the kind of guy who really needs to be in a big flock with other guys in charge, or to boss around. Or maybe he's just a putz. Who knows? You're giving him another chance, you're tempering kindness with pragmatism, and he's literally a lucky duck.

And your chickens will breathe a sigh of relief!

 

[Rosepath Garden]

We are south of New London.
The duck are just a hobby of mine and to give our boys the feeling of a farm.
But I think even my husband loves them now.
I do some free ranging around the gardens but try to keep the droppings out of the yard.

 

[Iain Utah]

If all goes well, I am about to have an ancona duckling! It just externally pipped... won't be long now! It is the only ancona surrounded by 10 hatching cayuga babies. Hope it doesn't develop an identity crisis before my 2nd set of ancona eggs (now growing nicely at day 7) hatch.

 

[Chicken Crazy12]

Post pics please! I just love baby ducklings being born... My next batch won't be due to hatch till the 8th, but I've got 19 going strong.

 

[Chicken Crazy12]

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[m.kitchengirl]

Good luck with your hatch Iain. And, those are some adorable ducks, chickencrazy.

I got the ducks for eggs for my baking, and because I have always loved ducks. I also wanted the kids to have some real life in the backyard since kids these days are surrounded by pretend reality. When I ended up with male ducks I decided to try to help the breed by keeping him & maybe selling hatching eggs. With my drake being such a little devil I think I am going to go back to my original plan of only keeping girl ducks. The backyard will be louder, but I won't have to assert my dominance over a 6 lb. duck anymore.

 

[Iain Utah]

Here is my new baby Honeydew... I wonder though... what happened to its spots??

 

[Chicken Crazy12]

Awwww. they are so preciouse when they first hatch.

The spots are gone, because the parent birds carry the recessive white gene. This is why I warn people about using the solid white ones as breeders, they may not produce solid white offspring the first gen, but once you add it in all resulting offspring will have the recessive white gene and can then pass it on and it can be hard to know who has the white gene unless you pair them off and hatch a good portion of eggs from them to see if they ever produce a solid white duckling. This would mean using a white male with a colored female and seeing if you ever get white (thus proving your female carries white) but all the babies would have to be culled because they now carry the white gene even if they are colored because their daddy has 2 copies of the white gene and gave them 1.

So far I have not hatched a single white duckling from my flock and I want to keep it that way. I'm hesitant with adding new blood in, but I'm adding some silvers from plum run and that's it. I will keep them seperate from my flock and hatch a few dz. eggs from them before adding them with my blacks and chocolates. As long as I don't get any solid white ducklings they will go into my flock.

A lot of people think that adding a solid white bird in to breed with heavily marked females will give you an evenly marked duck, but this just isn't true because of how the white gene works, it basically whites out the color of the bird, so that white duck very well could be a heavily marked duck under all that white out. Then you will have to deal with all of that recessive white being passed down, The bird may look normal but could still be carrying the recessive white and when paired to another duck that also carries the white if the genes line up right you get an all white duckling.

Hope that I haven't confused anyone