The Summer of Duck

Para, Nat and Eddie, our three lovely ducks enjoying a dip in their pool

I can't remember how the idea of keeping ducks came to pass but I do remember my son asking me "so you mean these will be pets that we don't eat right?" I said "yes, well, unless we have to". We did our research and found that Indian Runner ducks don't need a lot of water and don't fly. They seemed to meet our needs. I also thought they looked ridiculous and not all that different from bowling pins. We sourced a hatchery about two hours a way and ordered 10 Buckeye chicks, and  3 Indian Runner ducklings, one male and two females. We planned on eating their eggs and hatching ducklings down the road. We excitedly awaited the e-mail from the hatchery telling us the babies had hatched. Finally the notification came and we made arrangements to pick up or new brood in the spring.

Big pile of chicks and ducks

The ducks we thought we were raising

We arrived and the lady gathered our ducklings, put them in a box with some bedding and gave us a bit of instruction. They seemed lively and so adorable. She then told us a few of the Buckeye chickens had died but that was normal so we picked out some Americauna chicks to take home with the remaining 6 Buckeyes. They were all lively and peeping. We got home, and placed the chicks and ducklings in their respective large cardboard box's with bedding, water and food. The next day we noticed one of the Buckeye's seemed to be slow and not eating or drinking very much. I fed him drops of sugar water from the tip of my finger but he got worse. He died that night and I cried for the poor bugger. By the end of the month we lost all of the Buckeye's. Of course we assumed Buckeye's must be a difficult breed because we had raised several other breeds successfully. The Americauna's and ducks were doing great.

I had read ducks bond with humans if you get them young but our ducks never really came to us or liked to be cuddled. They grew, were very messy and eventually it got  warm enough to put them outside near a small man made pond in their yellow, wood duck house. They grew and swam and ate bugs. My how they loved the slugs from the garden. They also liked grasshoppers and cabbage worms. We grew to love them and they were very easy to watch and care for but we started to notice they did not look like Indian Runner ducks. Two were white and kind of large, more turkey shaped and one was white and tall and sort of Indian Runner like.  As they grew more feathers and bigger beaks and little waddle bits, we were able to identify them. My son loved dinosaurs at the time and named the ducks after duck billed dinosaurs. Nat (short for Anatosaurus) was a male Peking duck, the other two, a female named Eddie (Edmontosaurus) and large male named Para (Parasaurolophus) were Muscovies. Water loving, flying birds. The other characteristic we read about Muscovies is that they are large, weighing up to 18 pounds, with the male often engaging in brutal mating. We further read, you must never have two male ducks and one female as they will fight over her, even killing.

Well, they got on great, Eddie learning to fly. She would fly past our window in a blurr and one time I spotted her on the telephone wire but really, we adored them. We saw them mate a few times, much like the chickens do until one day we saw Para mounted on top of a much smaller Eddie in their swimming pool-pond and she was drowning as the male held her head under water for minutes long. I swatted an agitated Para away. Para grew and grew until he was rather like a turkey, but still, things were okay, if a little disturbing.

Then it changed. When I would take the ducks some food, instead of just waddling after me in a row, Para began nipping at my heels, hard. I started wearing rubber boots so it wouldn't hurt but he started getting more and more vicious. He went after my five year old in the fall and that was when we knew they wouldn't be around for winter. For once, the rest of the family didn't take much convincing. We had loved them but these were not the ducks suited to be our pets, they were suited and known for their great taste. Eddie was flying farther and higher and we didn't want to introduce Muscovy to the local population. Para was getting more and more vicious and requiring more and more food and Nat would have been lonely on his own with no mate, no other ducks and having not bonded to his humans.

My flying duck on a misty morning

It was a chilly, damp day when we finally got around to offing the ducks. The decision was made but we weren't keen to kill them. I boiled the water, Jim sharpened the axe. My friend gathered a bucket and a knife. Jim held them one by one and I chopped their heads off. My friend and Jim plucked the ducks. As a technical note, they are much easier to kill than chickens with those long, stuck out necks with only the shortest of feathers. They are much harder to pluck though because of the down. After that, it is the same process of gutting and cleaning. We gave one away to our dear friend as a thank you for helping out and froze the other two. Para was served in an orange sauce for Christmas dinner to my In-laws.

Someday I would like to try Indian Runners as we really did enjoy many of the aspects of raising ducks. The breeder gave us our money back and an apology. I later learned that the breeders had a bad reputation for unhealthy stock. The Americauna's did better but we lost a few and it was pretty disheartening to lose all of the Buckeye's.