Chicken + Duck = ???

[Sunny Side Up]

A few days ago I saw one of my young roosters mating with a duck hen. It surprised me to see that, but when I posted about it in another thread there were other folks who mentioned they also had this type of pairing at their places. One person even said she had a duck that was "married" to a rooster, and once the duck laid eggs & incubated them for a while, but then abandoned the nest. She said there were malformed chicks inside those eggs but couldn't tell if they looked more like chickens or ducks or a cross of both.

But I did an online search & found nothing on a chicken/duck hybrid. There was more than one place where folks thought they were seeing such a cross only to learn it was a muscovy duck they had seen. (I would have guessed duck/alien cross) I also found several links to recipes cooking the two birds together.

So I'm asking the experts here: is a chicken/duck hybrid possible? Are they called Chucks or Dickens?

And also, can a drake injure a chicken hen if he tries to mate with her? Would his penetrating parts cause injury to her vent?

 

[RAREROO]

I have heard of ChickensXGuineas, Chickens X Pheasants, Guineas X Peafowl, but the fertility rate was exstreamly low and the one or two that did hatch, usually die soon after.

But I would imagine that a Chuck or a Dicken would be impossible, I use to have a roo that tried to breed my Pekin duck hen, never tried to hatch the eggs though b/c I only had one duck. But I just could never see that happening, two completly different animals.

Feathersite has a page on Hybrids.

 

[roocrazy]

not gonna happen

 

[becky3086]

Quote:
Agree

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

Quote:
Agree

Okay, but WHY? There are a lot of other hybrids out there--why is chickenXduck not possible?

 

[roocrazy]

dunno to far away dna (its like a deer with a pig it just cant happen)
a horse and donkey can mix because their both in the equine familly
and a chicken and a duck cant because their two different familys

 

[Spore]

DNA incompatible for fertilization. It would take a lesson in biology and genetics to fully explain why. The sperm and egg could not unite to form a single cell because of genetic differences.

 

[Cetawin]

They are different species family for one thing...that takes major DNA twisting and so forth. I do not think an embryo would survive to hatch.

 

[Goose and Fig]

Quote:
Right

Duck breeds cross with eachother all the time- I think mallards have been known to have offspring with 80 (or more)different breeds. Maybe ducks "could" cross with geese, but in nature the situation probably doesn't arise very often.


As for cooking- you might be thinking of Turducken (chicken & duck stuffed inside a turkey). We got one from New Orleans one year- interesting, but I didn't like the stuffing they put between them. It was all spicey celery-bleh.

 

[FireTigeris]

http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hybrid-birds.htm

here's a cool site about different hybrids tho-