If the ducks are well and regularly fed, they should lay an average of twenty-three eggs apiece during the nesting season. We generally feed ours on maize, as it is less wasteful than smaller grain, and the birds lay well on it. One can, I think, count on 80 per cent. of the eggs hatching, and of birds actually hatched you ought, in a fair season, to rear 85 per cent. Having taken my reader as far as the hatching out of the young birds, I propose in my next chapter, which I consider the most important in the book, to deal with the question of their food, up to the time they are fit to shoot.
HATCHING AND REARING
THE REARING PADDOCK