Origin. Useful domestic ducks are of two species. All the breeds of this class, except the Muscovy Duck, are derived from the wild Mallard Duck, specimens of which are still frequently captured and domesticated. The Mallard takes very readily to domestication. Although in the wild state it is a migratory bird, in domestication it soon becomes too heavy to fly far. After a few generations in domestication it becomes as large as common domestic stock, loses its power of flight, and cannot be distinguished from stock that has been domesticated for centuries. Mallard Ducks captured in the wild state and kept in captivity have been known to lay from eighty to one hundred eggs in a season, which is as many as the average domestic duck lays.
Fig. 122. Domesticated Mallard Ducks, Brook View Farm, Newbury, Massachusetts
When ducks were first domesticated is not known. The figure of a duck was used in the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphics. As the Mallard is widely distributed and so easily tamed, and as domestic ducks of the same type (but apparently not related in domestication) are found in widely separated parts of the earth, it is plain that the distribution of domestic ducks has been less dependent upon the movements of the human race than the distribution of the fowl. Wherever at any time in the history of the world male and female wild Mallards happened to be caught and kept in captivity, a domestic race might be developed. A missionary who went to Africa in 1885 and worked among the Bakubas—a people more than a thousand miles from the west coast of the continent—reported that he found there such little mongrel fowls as are common elsewhere in Africa, and a local race of domestic ducks varied in color as are the common ducks of Europe and America, but as large as the Rouen and Pekin ducks. The Bakubas had had so little intercourse with civilized peoples that it was not at all likely that an improved race of ducks had been introduced from the outside world, and whatever possibility of that might be supposed to exist, the fact that the ducks of this country, like the domestic quadrupeds, were dumb indicates that they are a distinct and very old domestic race.
Fig. 123. Colored Muscovy Ducks. (Photograph by E. J. Hall)
It is worth noting in this connection that the missionary, Dr. William H. Sheppard, found it the accepted opinion among this savage people that, by a process of natural selection, the character of dumbness had been acquired by the domestic animals, to which it gave a measure of protection from wild enemies in the forest around them. It seems wonderful that the theory of evolution was found out by such people before it was developed by modern scientists.