Place of ducks in domestication. It has been stated that if there were no fowls, the duck would make the best substitute, but as we have fowls in great variety, and as they suit us better than ducks for nearly every purpose for which either might be used, ducks are not often kept in place of fowls. Small flocks of ducks are kept in addition to a flock of fowls, both on farms and by town poultry keepers, either because the owner likes to have them about or to add to the variety of poultry meat for home consumption. The flocks of ducks so kept are of comparatively little economic importance. The ratio of ducks to fowls is only about one to fifty, and the ratio of values of the products of these two kinds of poultry is probably nearer one to one hundred. But when poultry keeping is made a special business, duck growing gives the surest and the largest profits, because ducks can be grown in large numbers more easily than any other domestic animal. The largest permanently successful poultry farms in the world are the great duck farms of the United States.
Fig. 129. Black and White Call Ducks, Brook View Farm, Newbury, Massachusetts
To the fancier, ducks are decidedly less interesting than fowls, not only because, as has already been stated, they present fewer superficial characters upon which he can exercise his art, but because they are, on the whole, less intelligent and less capable of developing confidence in one who handles them. Fowls are much easier to handle in the way the fancier must often handle his birds for thorough examination. As a rule, a fowl quickly learns that it is not going to be hurt, and the more it is handled the tamer it becomes. Young ducks are almost stupidly fearless of the person who feeds them, as long as he goes among them without touching them, but after he catches them they are as stupidly shy. It takes very much more patience to handle ducks as a fancier handles birds than the average human being possesses, and so very few people find them satisfactory for pets after they cease to be a novelty.
Perhaps if the interest in the breeding of ducks for exhibition were greater, stocks of ducks that were free from this timidity could gradually be developed. Individual birds are often found which are not at all shy; and, as a rule, persistent selection for any quality will eventually make it a race characteristic.
CHAPTER VII
MANAGEMENT OF DUCKS
Although ducks delight in the water and, when they have an opportunity to do so, spend a considerable part of the time in it, they are often kept very successfully where they have no water except for drinking. Some duck breeders, who have kept their ducks for many generations without water in which they could swim, have said that the ducks lost all desire to swim, and that birds of such stock would not go into the water even when they had the opportunity to do so. This statement greatly exaggerates the facts. Any young duck, no matter how the stock from which it came has been kept, will take to the water as soon as it can run about if it is given access to water at that time; but if young ducks are kept away from the water until they are several weeks old, and then given access to water in which they can swim, they are often as much afraid of the water as they would be of any object to which they were not accustomed. If they remain near the water, however, it will not be long before they follow their natural instinct to get into it. Having once entered the water, they are immediately as much at home there as if they had always known the pleasures of life in that element.