Orange, our Chocolate Muscovy male, is very much part of the duck flock now. Interestingly, a 'group' of ducks can be called a flock, brace, raft, team or paddling. Ducks are generally referred to as a flock while they are in flight and as a raft, team or paddling while on water. As mentioned before we still have five youngsters from last year, all of course Grape’s offspring. These are however, the ones that Orange has bonded with and so it will be rather sad if they ALL get sold. We may keep two for Orange and accept the fact that Grape may well mate with them too.
Our plans for hatching will be to try to sell more ducklings if we can, as opposed to waiting until we can sex the birds and selling them as young ducks. This is mainly to do with the fact that spare males always end up in our freezer and as we have rather a lot from last year to eat still, we don’t really want to be adding to it. As our meat consumption goes down, we need to ensure our breeding does too!
We could of course try to sell fertile duck eggs, rather than doing too much of our own hatching. It’s always difficult though working out whether raising birds and having to feed them is more or less profitable than selling eggs where all you are doing is feeding the adult birds!!
We will see what the next few weeks brings and make some decisions as the ducks start to lay... probably some time next month!!