As fate would have it, all but one of my ducks are boys. Yep. Three boys and one lone girl. Ugh!
I knew early on that the Pekin was a female. After much research, I found that there is a distinct difference in the quacks of the male and female of some duck breeds. Turns out that the girls are really loud and very vocal...imagine that. This little lady was screaming before we ever got her into box to take her home from the feed store. Her quack is now more of a honk. It's really funny to listen to because she sounds more like a goose than a duck.
Males, on the other hand, tend to be more quiet and refuse to quack and, when they do, it's a deeper sound.
At about 9-10 weeks old, one of my sons helped me video their sounds individually and I was certain then that we had three males and one female. Determined to be wrong, I decided my ears weren't capable of hearing the correct sounds and decided to wait until the visual signs appeared.
Males develop a drake feather (a feather that curls upward on their tails) and females, obviously, lay eggs. The Rouen male would have a white ring around his neck (I call it a collar) and a green head and the female would have brown feathers all over.
When one of the Rouens began developing his green head feathers and his white collar, I celebrated! That meant one drake and one duck!
Then about 2 weeks later, I noticed a white dot on the throat area of my other Rouen's neck. Uht-oh! Upon further inspection, I saw the green head feathers coming in just like the first one.
On the very same day, guess who developed his drake feather? My black Runner Duck...or I should say Runner Drake.
My dreams of all the big, beautiful, colored duck eggs washed straight down the drain. Now, I only have one duck to lay eggs and they will be a normal, boring white. And it's terrible news for my lone girl. She will have three boys fighting for her affection and that can be really dangerous for her. For this reason, I have to get rid of drakes or get several more girls to keep the boys occupied.
We decided to butcher the Rouen's since our intention was to breed them for meat anyway and we wanted to try the meat before committing to breed them. (More on that experience later.) We butchered one and will butcher or sell the other.
We are now in the process of deciding what our next move will be with ducks. Will we replace them? Will we rid ourselves of them entirely? I'm not sure, really. So, for now, I'm just going to enjoy them and not worry about it.
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