I found some fertile Serama eggs from a very knowledgeable local breeder:

He advised me that Seramas have notably low fertility rates and gave me the freshest eggs and several pointers to help them incubate properly. I had already researched their background: mixed bantams contributed to these little guys in Malaysia, with several body ‘types’ like from Malaysia, or the US type from imported birds. Seramas come in all color patterns, but for showing purposes, the APA only accepts White while the Bantam shows allow for a few more colors.

Another small[est] chicken is the Kikiriki from Puerto Rico (its name is the phonetic sound of a teeny rooster crow in Spanish). This isn’t a breed per se, just very small chickens that don’t necessarily have the distinguishing Serama traits, mainly their upright ‘confident’ stance and differences in feet length. Kikirikis can also vary in size more than Seramas, from micro to average. Some Seramas carry silkie or frizzle feather genes from the bantams that contributed to their genetics, but I didn’t want to dabble with those genes or particularly like the appearance. Seramas can also be crossbred with Naked Neck genes, but even though I like the Naked Neck attributes in regular sized chickens, none of my family members like the look.

That first batch of 22 eggs had 13 that started developing, but only 6 of those hatched.

The chicks were tiny and adorable, so of course were handled frequently while growing in the indoor brooder.

I documented their progress and colors carefully, naming them after small soccer clubs in our family tradition. As time went by and I asked people familiar with chickens and Seramas…I realized all six were roosters! So I began planning the next hatch from the same breeder and rehomed 4 of the roos, keeping a whitish color roo (Zaragoza) and a darker chick with big eyes that ‘could’ be a hen (Bari).

The second batch of eggs had been collected during an ice storm, which could have affected their fertility, but I was willing to try anyway. About half of those 24 started developing, but unfortunately none of them survived to even attempt hatching. I sent the eggs to my local high school Anatomy & Physiology students to do eggtopsies and attempt to determine what had gone wrong (none of the chicks were deformed and all were very advanced when they died, so my incubator isn’t to blame).

Phase Two of project Serama then was to find several hens for my two handsome roos. My goal was to find four hens to keep with the two roos in an enclosed coop with everything they needed and occasional time out in a tractor during sunny weather or coop clean-out. My husband designed and built an amazing chicken castle for smøl (small) chickens, fully predator proof, that we refer to as the ‘Smøldorf Astoria’. I found a breeder selling months old, sexed Serama hens and am very pleased to have a separate bloodline from my roosters’ line to prevent inbreeding. We named them Patricia, Gabriela, Sofia and Nicol.

I lost track of which two hens were a month older, which didn’t end up mattering because within a week of getting the ladies I had an egg! I would get an itty bitty egg every other day and figured out because of her egg song and nesting behavior that it was Patricia’s. I contacted the breeder and she said yes, the hens had been part of a flock with roosters, so the eggs could be fertilized. I tried incubating seven of them (I didn’t want them to be much older than a week to increase hatchability and my roos were not mature enough yet to fertilize eggs), but none of them developed. Pretty quickly after setting up the coop with some nest ‘boxes’ - Serama size - filled with comfy straw, Patricia decided she wanted to brood. Her personality changed to spending most of the time fluffed up inside the nest and making weird sounds that made me think she had a respiratory illness if I hadn’t seen her in the nest all the time. When we had another cold snap (Seramas are not very cold tolerant, which is fine for our Texas average weather), I moved the chickens to a brooder box inside the house at night. Patricia was transported inside the nest, growling the entire way, to her own kennel next to the brooder box where she could hear her friends but not be bothered. When another hen began laying (Nicol? Gabriela? I’m still not sure who, or maybe both), they decided that Patricia’s nest was the only place for eggs, even with her in it! That led to some funny scenes and the need for me to sneak and candle eggs whenever Patricia happens to get off the nest for a bit to stretch her legs and get a bite to eat (fresh mealworms usually draw her off the nest and reward her efforts).

At four/five months old, the roosters have apparently matured enough to begin roosterly activities, but I haven’t seen fertilized eggs yet. I’m excited to see if a broody hen can hatch chicks with more success than the incubator.

Because of their small size, all of the Seramas are easily caught and regularly handled. I move them in pairs by hand to and from their tractor and even though they are predator aware, they aren’t flighty or wiggly. The roosters alarm to anything that flies overhead (sounds like a clogged garbage disposal) and a sound specific to when they see our cat Isa walk by. Isa likes to nap on top of the coop, falling asleep while watching the birds do their birdy things, but if she jumps or runs, the chickens alarm and freeze while watching her carefully.

Bari is top rooster and very confident: he inspects everything I put into the coop, calls the girls over for tasty food, dances to impress me and has even given me a few pecks if I’m paying attention to someone else. This would probably be annoying and dangerous in a regular sized rooster, but in this guy it’s just cute. Sofia is tame to a strange degree, I originally thought she might be eggbound or sick, but after holding her and treating her with calcium drops…she just likes to be held. She normally hides under the hanging waterer to get away from pesky roosters and overbearing hens, but comes right up to the door every time a person is near. I look forward to spending a lot of time just hanging out and cuddling with her!

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Seramas are nowhere as noisy as other chickens or birds. The roosters have learned to perfect their crow over several weeks (quite entertaining as they try and learn to crow). Bari will wake up and start crowing as soon as he sees a light inside the house come on regardless of if the sun’s out or not, and will crow throughout the day. Zaragoza despite evidence of being a rooster earlier than Bari is not top roo and is still working on his crow when he can get a crow in edgewise.

The hens will sing their egg song around the time they need to lay, an indicator that I need to go check and see where the egg is since the not-Patricia nest is detestable for some reason. Eggs end up on the floor of the coop or in the dust bath instead of the perfectly fine nest with clean straw, of course.

The coop has everything they need inside since I can’t safely free range the Seramas. The perches are natural oak branches wired to the roof so they don’t fall. The wires cause the perches to have a bit of swing to them, which the chickens adjusted to quickly and it mimics the swaying branches their wild cousins sleep in. Their waterer hangs at a height they can easily drink from but keeps the water cleaner from tidbits getting into it. It’s hung in an area away from sleeping perches so it doesn’t get coated in poop every night. It took me a few tries to figure out the coop floor: shavings blew away in the wind and so weren’t effective, cardboard was a solid, reused material but their feet kept getting dirty with poop stuck to it, so I eventually settled on leaving the mesh floor open and most of the poop falls through. Their food and dust bath are in plant pot trays and that keeps it contained unless scratched and spread, which also falls through the floor. I use a cat litter scoop to sift through the dust bath and scrape any poops off the coop whenever needed. My husband designed the coop mesh edges to be inside the frame and the doors are lined and closed with locked latches. The whole coop sits on our back porch so I am confident that it’s predator-proof. A nice last touch for the coop was to add a retractable awning to the front, so if the morning sun is too intense, it can be pulled down to keep the chickens comfortable. When the day warmed up quickly for springtime, I emptied a dust bath tray and added water, rose petals and some live mealworms. Though wary at first, the chickens quickly enjoyed standing or walking in the water to cool off their feet and pick through the floating plants and bugs.

Finding a diet that worked for the Seramas was a bit trickier, since their very small size means their food morsels need to be quite small. My other birds eat pellets and scratch only, since crumbles and powder create too much waste for adult birds. Seramas tolerate high protein feed well, so I base their diet off of a Multi-Flock 22% protein crumble I use to start feeding my hatchlings. They also get a mix of dove birdseed, Zupreem Fruitblend budgie pellets and a small handful of chopped alfalfa. I bought a bag of Purina Layena pearls, but even the small pearls seem to be too big for the Seramas. When I change out the chicken’s food, my free-ranging flock gets the leftovers, so not a calorie is wasted! Their dust bath includes bagged sand, wood ash from our firepit and chick grit (pebbles plus probiotics). They are free to bathe in this mix and eat any bits they might find appealing. The ash keeps them free of parasites and occasionally eating bits of charcoal can be good for their digestion as well, even if it leads to some weird grayish poops.

A big concern I had with four hens was calcium supplementation for strong eggshells and their health. My flock prefers Flaked oyster shell over the pebble type for chickens and checking the pebbles in the store, they still looked too big for my Seramas. So I came up with a system that saved eggshells (duck, turkey) from my flock that we use for eating, baked at 350 degrees for 12 minutes, cooled then crushed very well. The eggshells need to be baked to kill contaminants as well as not to train your birds to eat eggs. That is a very bad habit that is difficult to break chickens of once it gets started. The crushed shells get added to the dust bath, which saves on space in the coop and allows them some entertainment or enrichment by having to scratch and pick through the dust to eat it. Whenever I can, I will pick some (safe) greens from our yard for them to eat: sourgrass and dandelions are by far favorites, along with chicory, grass and henbit. Fresh plants like this are chock full of phytonutrients, vitamins, calcium and of course, fiber. The chickens also occasionally get live mealworms from my worm farm, bedding included (wheat bran and oats) that is all edible and enjoyable to the birds. They will also get small leftovers from the kitchen - shredded cheese is a favorite - so overall, I feel good that they get a varied diet that covers all the bases. I dewormed them when I first brought them home and sprayed for lice/mites, but since they don’t free range or have access to my other birds, it’s not a concern for me to continue that unless I sense a problem or illness.

Would I recommend Seramas? Absolutely. They aren’t going to be a homesteading staple, but for chicken enthusiasts or small living spaces, cuddly pets or ornamental purposes, they are perfect.

Footnotes / Resources:

American Serama Association

2-3 citrus fruits, well washed and rinsed, zested (I used 2 limes and 1 lemon)

3 room temperature duck eggs

1 cup white sugar [preferably vanilla sugar]

2 Tbsp each butter and vegetable shortening, softened together in the microwave

3/4 cup milk

2 tsp baking powder

Heavy pinch salt

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 3/4 cups all purpose flour

For the glaze: the juice from the citrus, powdered sugar

Heat oven to 350 degrees and prepare the citrus fruits. They should be well scrubbed with soap, rinsed and zested. Try not to get into the white rind of the fruits while zesting since this will add bitterness instead of flavor.

Add 1-2 Tbsp of the AP flour to the zest and stir well, even pressing the zest into the flour with a spoon. This flour coating will help the zest flavor the cake during the entire cooking time instead of disintegrating quickly into the dough.

Next, whip the duck eggs with the sugar on high for at least 2 minutes.

You want a nice froth you get from duck eggs, chicken eggs do not have this kind of lift.

To the egg mixture add the baking powder, salt and vanilla.

Pour the milk into the softened butter and shortening (it’s okay if the shortening clumps, you don’t want to pour anything hot into the egg mixture). Then pour the milk and butter into the egg mixture and mix on medium until it’s mixed well.

Add the flour (1 3/4 cup minus what was added to the zest) and the zest mixture to the bowl and mix on medium again only until well mixed, you don’t want to overmix at this point. Pour into a well-greased loaf pan (or two pans for a shorter loaf) and bake for 60 minutes, checking at 45 minutes for doneness. The cakes will likely split on the top, but that’s fine. While the cakes are baking, mix the juice from the citrus fruits with powdered sugar, pinch of salt and a tsp of vanilla extract to the degree of thickness you prefer the glaze (more powdered sugar = icing, more liquid = glaze).

Once the cakes cool, remove them to a plate and pour the glaze on the top until it runs down the sides. Serve as is or with whipped cream.

Footnotes:

I adapted this recipe for ingredients and technique from the “Loaf o’Gold Cake” recipe in the 1961 Betty Crocker Cookbook

Ingredients:

Apple Cider Vinegar (cheap filtered brands are fine without the vinegar mother because you don’t want to clog the sprayer)

Brown or Gold Mouthwash (I’ve heard it called both colors, but you want to stay away from blue/green dyes. Brand is not important, but look for Menthol and Eucalyptol as ingredients. Obviously these sting, so never use near eyes, mucus membranes or broken skin/wounds!)

PineSol (it does have to be this particular brand and just the liquid, regular cleaner, nothing in a spray bottle or with foamers or other additives)

Collect your ingredients along with a funnel, measuring cup and 32 oz empty spray bottle. I’ve reused my empty fly spray bottles for this purpose, if there’s any little bit left in the bottle we’re killing bugs anyway.

Cover your work space with paper towels. This is not optional, since even with a funnel and spouted measuring cups, it ends up outside of the bottle as well. Add one cup of each product, ending with the ACV. Close tightly and mix gently by inverting the bottle a few times (no need to shake vigorously or you’ll just get foam inside the bottle). Each time you pick it up to use it, give it a gentle swirl to mix. Store away from direct sunlight and heat.

The wet paper towels - don’t just throw those away! These are great for cleaning up areas that are also prone to bug invasion (doorframes, baseboards, thresholds).

Even though flies were the intended recipients of this spray, I use it primarily for ants. The war against ants in my barn is endless because of the tiny bits of bird feed that attract ants. The spray is especially effective on the ant trails because it messes with the scents the ants themselves lay down while foraging. The spray will also work on wasps - it doesn’t kill them immediately, but will knock them down to the ground where they can be stepped on. I reapply to the area where the wasps build their nest every other day until they’re not interested anymore (I also think the smell of the spray bothers them).

I don’t spray this directly on my birds (unless they are being attacked by many ants on their legs and promptly rinse it off). You also want to avoid spraying in the birds’ drinking or swimming water and food as it has a lot of soap-like ingredients. Just in case, you can rinse well any sprayed areas after the bugs are dead, it makes an excellent cleaning product as well.

Do you have any old-timer recipes that work well on your homestead?

Spice shopping list (buy at a Latin market or online):

Whole black peppercorns

Whole allspice berries

Whole bay leaves (laurel)

Achiote / Annatto (easiest to find and store as a paste)

Mexican oregano (has a different taste than the oregano used in Italian recipes)

Whole cloves

Cinnamon sticks

Cumin

For the pickled onions (in addition to the above spices that we’ll use in the recipe instructions below):

Red onions, peeled and sliced thin

White vinegar

Several large oranges (for juice)

One average size lemon

Optional: a spicy pepper (chile) - serrano pepper works best here for consistent heat, sliced thin. For moderate heat, add the pepper before heating the brine. For more heat, add the pepper slices raw to the jar when adding the cooled onions and brine.

Pickled red onions (this is a crucial garnish for the meat since the flavors both contrast and complement each other): [Make a week before so the onions have full flavor at serving time]

In a saucepan with room for the onions, add a tablespoon of pink salt, 2-3 bay leaves, a dozen peppercorns and six allspice berries.

Wash the citrus fruits very well with soap and rinse well. Juice them carefully, straining out the pulp and definitely all seeds - they are bitter. Reserve a large piece of peel from an orange and the lemon - no stems or seeds - for flavoring the onion brine. Add the peels and strained juice to the pot with 1/2 cup white vinegar.

Bring that to a bare boil, stir occasionally to mix in the salt and spices (not a rolling boil, you want to flavor the brine but not overheat it or have it evaporate). Flip the peels over and use them to stir the brine gently to take advantage of the oils and flavor from the peels. Remove the peels and squeeze them against the side of the pot before adding the onions.

After adding the onions, mix well and allow it to come to a bare boil again for a few minutes, then remove the pot from heat. The goal is to soften the onions and flavor them without overcooking them where they’re mushy. Move the pot to a back spot on your stove and allow to cool down completely.

Once cooled, spoon the onions into a glass jar. Pick out any large pieces of bay leaves, but leave the peppercorns and berries in the brine. Pour the brine over the onions and push them down into the brine if it doesn’t cover them. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

For the pibil marinade and sauce:

Separate a head of garlic into cloves, remove loose papers but do not peel them. Place them onto a metal skewer and char them (preferably over a wood-burning fire, but if you don’t have that available a blowtorch, gas burner or hot skillet without oil works). After charring, peel the garlic as much as possible and leave any blackened areas. Also char the ends of a small cinnamon stick and knock off any loose ashes. The smoky flavor from the char will add some depth to the pibil sauce without overwhelming it.

Add several tablespoons of oil (canola or vegetable oil that can handle high temps, no olive oil) to a saucepan or frying pan and allow to heat up while you add the spices: 1/4 cup annatto paste, 2 tablespoons Mexican oregano, 3 whole cloves, 2 tablespoons peppercorns, cumin (to your level of enjoyment of this spice, some people find it overwhelming) and ~10 allspice berries. Allow the spices to simmer on a low sauté setting, never deep frying or burning.

Add the charred garlic and cinnamon and stir occasionally, breaking up the annatto paste but it doesn’t have to be fully mixed:

While this is happening, juice several well-washed and rinsed oranges. You want to keep several of the squeezed peels for the marinade and cooking, but none with stems or spots and no seeds or excessive pulp. When the spices are fragrant, remove from heat and allow to cool if it got too hot during the sauté. Add and mix in the orange juice, 1/4 cup white vinegar and several healthy pinches of a salty salt (sea salt or pink salt work well here).

Marinate your duck with the spices and peels at least overnight. I use the same bag the duck is stored in, pour the spices on and through the duck, add orange peels, remove as much air as possible from the bag, seal it and store upright overnight. You want the spices and peels to be in contact with the duck to absorb as much flavor as possible.

After an overnight marinade, prepare the smallest crockpot that will fit the duck with a healthy dose of oil in the bottom (olive oil is fine here, especially if you have a seasoned one that fits the flavor profile: garlic, chile, citrus). Place several pinches of salt, the duck, spices and peels inside the crockpot with the peels on top if possible. Cook, covered on High for at least six hours, removing the orange peels and discarding after two hours.

After cooking, remove bones and skin from the duck and discard. Serve the shredded meat on warm corn tortillas and the pickled onions as garnish:

¡Buen provecho!

Footnotes & resources:

*A resting period in the fridge is beneficial to the point of necessity for any farm fresh poultry. If you pick up a slab of chicken at the grocery store, it has a “use by” date, but that doesn’t tell you when this animal was butchered, how long it spent sitting on a truck or even on the supermarket shelf. It also won’t mention the lack of care and cleanliness that went into butchering this animal effectively and in a sanitary matter, which it’s then washed in and injected with chemicals to account for this. A pasture-raised animal has been allowed to move around vs extreme cage confinement and has eaten a variety of more natural things vs being only offered a high-corn or -grain feed designed to fatten quickly and give the meat a mild taste. Allowing a bird to rest in the fridge for several days and cooking it whole in a crockpot yields a very tender and flavorful meal. You will usually get a more even ratio of dark and white meat depending on the breed of the bird and way more depth of flavor. These aren’t wild-bred birds, so “gamey” is not how I would describe it, but if you’re only used to eating meat that comes on styrofoam plates, it may be very complex flavors at first. Larger pasture raised birds (turkeys, geese) will have more leg muscling from walking around for dark meat fans and stronger attachments (ligaments, tendons). The skin of pasture-raised birds is also an important part of the cooking process, especially if you are roasting birds as a natural barrier that is fat-based to keep the bird moist.

First, the sex linked color results were 100% accurate and easy to distinguish. The mallards and blues were males, the buffs were females. And then there’s Chanel, but we’ll discuss her later under color results.

This is because of how the chocolate gene works in ducks: breeding a drake with Chocolate (in this case, my Standard Buff drakes) to a non-Chocolate duck results in sex-linked offspring. I’ve done this twice now, with my Cayuga ducks (results: Blue males, Lilac females) and with my Crested White ladies. The colors are easy to distinguish at hatch and this method is completely accurate compared to a 65-80% accuracy from vent sexing.

Now on to color results from these hatches…I rely heavily on the duck color calculator to plan my breeding, but in this case it was not accurate, or not fully so. To explain why, let’s look at certain color genes in ducks that came into play.

White is funny because two genes result in a visibly white duck that could technically be any color ‘underneath’. With Black, the chocolate gene resulted in a lightening of the base color reliably (males being darker ‘fade’ to Blue, whereas females fade to a much lighter Lilac color). After figuring out my color results with my White girls, I had to rework the calculator a LOT to come to a possible conclusion that one [or more?] of my Crested ducks is actually a Blue Bibbed ‘underneath’ her white feathers. My three Crested ladies like to lay their eggs in the same nest and other than egg size difference sometimes, there isn’t a way for me to tell the eggs apart even though I am sure which eggs came from my Cresteds vs my other females that lay individually and in separate nests. A double Black results in a Black duck, visibly and genetically (this is called Extended Black and is represented by an E genetically). A double White results in a visibly white duck, but lurking underneath are some surprise color genes which can only be teased out in her offspring. Calculating a Standard Buff drake on a Blue Bibbed female would give sex linked ducklings that fit some of the results I got, including Silver/Lilac Bibbed females, Blue Bibbed males and Black Bibbed males. I hatched a Black Bibbed duckling that ended up being male, but I thought that the dad was my Cayuga drake Getafe - on one of my Crested White ducks only results in Black Bibbed, males and females. I can assume that the odds were not favorable to hatch out the other results: a Silver Bibbed male and a Chocolate Bibbed female for the 6 possible results.

Mallard or Gray was one of the results I was supposed to get, males. At hatch, because of the dark and yellow patterning with eyestripes, I assumed this was what I got.

It took months for me to determine his true color pattern, because I hadn’t owned a mallard-patterned drake before and wasn’t familiar with their feather changes. Juvenile and non-breeding males have an eclipse plumage that is basically all brown, just like mallard females. Nuptial plumage is their colorful breeding feather pattern and can be several tones of colors with a mallard base pattern. Mallard/Gray in this case would be the classic green head, brown chest and silvery body. It took Borussia [pictured above, my oldest ‘mallard’ from the Crested hatches] months to develop out of his juvenile brown into finally his true color, which is actually Blue Mallard / Blue Fawn. As you can see above, when he feathered out completely, there is no green on his head, only a dark gray. Borussia is also missing the white ring around his throat, likely a result of him carrying a Dusky gene. I had a total of 7 drakes this color hatch from 3 batches, of which I will keep Borussia for breeding, along with Bob Ross:

What at hatch I thought were the Blue Mallard males I wanted, ended up being Blue Bibbed [Blue Swedish]. These drakes have a dark blue head and steely blue body with a prominent white bib. Their color patterns have remained consistent from hatch to maturity, including their white belly spots they hatched with remaining the same as they feather out.

Buff mallard females were the next results, divided into Buff Chocolate or Buff Lilac. At hatch, these ducklings were yellow with variations of eyestripes and feet color, very much like Buff ducklings. I kept a few with visible crests to continue my breeding project and sold a few without visible crests. Once again, the sex-linked accuracy allowed me to confidently sell young ducklings as females and is very convenient for planning a flock. I’m glad I withheld more females than I thought I would need, since I lost my lovely duck Paris to a copperhead bite**. She had the biggest crest, a creamy Buff color pattern and was a huge loss to me personally and genetically.

So for my breeding plans from these summer hatches I have Buff mallards Gunner, Givenchy, Lauren, Lilac Burnley and Question Mark Chanel.

I think the pattern most closely matching the color these ladies ended up being is actually the female Blue Mallard or Apricot Mallard/Pastel which are Call duck colors. Clearly their base color is Buff, but with mallard patterning like eyestripes, throat ring and blue wing tips.

Burnley is the typical Lilac color, perhaps a smidge darker than adults Fio & Raja because she is younger and Black ducks tend to get lighter/white feathers that replace black ones as they age. These Lilacs (all from Buff drake x Cayuga duck) tend to have a brownish tinge to their coloring compared to a Silver Splash duck, which is more of a silver gray. Which brings me to my sweet question mark duckling, Chanel. I originally thought she might be ‘Buff Lilac mallard’ to all of the rest of the females I hatched ‘Buff Chocolate’…or vice versa? But she definitely isn’t Chocolate, and her color is very light silver compared to my Lilacs:

Simply looking at her color, she could be Silver/Splash, Silver Bibbed or Lilac Bibbed. None of these were options on the color calculator. She doesn’t seem to have the ‘Buff’ part of the Buff mallard predicted, either. I’ve hatched a few Silver/Splash ducklings [including the drake in the picture above from a Buff drake x Lilac duck] and enjoy comparing these ducklings, although every one is unique. This drake has an orangey bill and feet (first Silver drake I’ve hatched, so that’s probably why), a disseminated white bib and some Buff feathers tucked in amongst the mostly gray ones.

My spidey senses tell me that Chanel is actually a Silver Bibbed, but I will have to determine that based on her offspring in future breedings. The Silver is necessary to produce 100% Blues when combined with Black. Breeding Blues to Blues will give a mix of Blues, Silver and mostly Black. This applies whether solid colors or Bibbed as in Swedish ducks. Hatcheries use this strategy to be able to provide Swedish ducks in predictable amounts from these three colors by rotating the pairings. Solid Blue crested offspring from Chanel if it happens works perfectly for the Crested Black duck line since Black x Blue gives Black and Blue.

I still ended up with a colorful group of ducks, most crested and that fit with my breeding projects (Crested Black and a group that breeds Blue Mallards and Apricot Mallards). I can study and maintain breeding lines/colors based on these groups, but am also continuing to study and refine the colors as well as body size. I’m currently incubating a batch of eggs that will help with 2/3 of my fall goals: 1) Can Aurélien my Crested Cayuga pass his crest on genetically? Since his crest is a spontaneous mutation from non-Crested parents, it’s possible that he does not pass it on. 2) Check the breeding ability of my two Saxony drakes and what they pass on as far as coloring and body size [this would be a non-Crested group that would be used to improve the Blue Mallard pattern].

The third goal was to see if perhaps with time and maturity if the four Blue ducklings I hatched in the summer are actually some form of Blue Mallard instead of just being Blue Bibbed. Two were crested and two were not, and are pretty drakes, but not the color pattern I want to keep in my flock. I can wait a few more months to double check, but I really think they are Blue Bibbed and will stay the color and patterns they hatched with.

In the meantime, I will continue to use the color calculator to try and plan breedings, but always keeping the grains of salt of my experiences and dedication to longterm study of my ducks as a consideration. Having pens of ducks only for breeding purposes to fit some sort of standard or ideal has never been what I wanted to do, so I remain dedicated to achieving my flock goals while still ensuring I have free ranging, happy and healthy ducks for me and others to enjoy.

Footnotes & resources:

A fantastic explanation of genes and colors by Ducks of Providence

**This same snake attacked two other ducklings that were younger. A crested male had neurological symptoms that slowly worsened over several days and he ended up dying even though up until the last day he had been eating, drinking with assistance and pooping normally. The last day I tried to tube feed him to make sure he was getting enough fluids, but his paralysis ended up killing him. From the July hatch, I had a Lilac female from Leganés Cayuga’s gray egg (my other two adult Lilacs are daughters of my Cayuga Rayo and lay white eggs). I found her two evenings after the snake attack with a very full crop and sitting under the yard cart with her eyes closed. I brought her inside and treated her with a crop massage as well as cleaning her eyes and coating them with coconut oil to keep her eyelids from sticking. After two days and one evening inside with her own food she ate willingly, she rejoined the flock and recovered completely. I was grateful she did, since I no longer have any Buff drakes to make sex linked ducklings.

I didn’t plan or like to lose any of my Crested ducklings, but I used the opportunity to check the deceased ducks’ skull for holes, attachments or issues related to their crests. The myth that crested ducklings are unethically bred, have holes in their skulls and live miserable lives persists throughout the internet despite a lack of evidence beyond one minimal study. Finally, some additional research has started to be done (this blog post details it nicely) that doesn’t exactly address the ‘die in the shell’ part of crested eggs especially comparing it to the normal lethality in non-crested eggs. I’ve continuously said-ranted even- that there aren’t detailed studies that include bloodline diversity, natural vs acquired crests and over the natural life of Crested ducks. Based on my experiences, I think [still] that more research needs to be done to determine if the lethality and issues in Crested ducks are more compared to non-Crested ducks and anatomical studies on Crested ducks of all ages, in case ducklings can hatch with a softer area or hole in the skull that closes up with age. Studies need to be done to determine IF the trait being passed on is a hole in the skull that the body then deposits fat and feathers (the crest) on top of, since it is possible to pass on a crest without a hole, as I determined in my hatchlings. I was surprised at the size of the crests on many of my hatchlings since these were heterozygous (one Crested parent and one not Crested). The only Crested duck I’ve necropsied so far that had a hole and neurological symptoms was a young duckling (under 8 weeks old) from Tractor Supply, which generally uses Hoover’s Hatchery for their ducklings. I also regularly pick up my alive Crested ducks of different sexes and sizes to feel their crests and have yet to feel a hole or have unexplained neurological symptoms. I lost a Buff duckling (no crests or genes) in the spring to a weakness/wasting away disease that was either botulism or ‘hardware disease’, but both are speculation. None of the other ducklings in its large group even got ill under all of the same living conditions, so botulism doesn’t seem likely unless this particular duckling had a weaker immune system than the others.

The commonly held belief on Crested ducks is that Dutch traders brought back Bali ducks (likely Crested Runner ducks) from the Indonesia area and bred them to heavier local ducks (similar to a Pekin). Since the 1700s, these unique-looking ducks have shown up in literature and art ever since. No wonder - of the duck breeds I’ve been able to own myself, they have the most character and least flightiness as well as an attractive poof on their head that varies in size and shape. A particular quirk I’ve noticed that they pass on to their offspring (along with just having the husbandry opportunity for it on my little ranch) is that they love to be sprayed with the hose. Not just a delicate sprinkle, they line up to be sprayed full in the face while catching water with bill chomps. They also have an uncanny sense of time, specifically the sprinkler schedule and along with slurping the water that collects around the sprinkler base, enjoy being sprayed inches from the nozzle. My other ducks (Cayuga, Buff and Saxony) enjoy the water but not quite that much and prefer swimming over spraying.

I have purchased 5 Cresteds from two different hatcheries, found a naturally occurring crest on a Cayuga on Craigslist and hatched over 20 ducklings from Crested breedings myself. I only had neurological issues show up in one. These were my first four Cresteds, purchased at a local Tractor Supply that is mainly supplied by Hoover’s Hatchery.

Nothing was out of the ordinary at first, but with a few weeks I started to wonder if this duckling was blind or nearly, and possibly deaf. It started to lag behind any time the others would run off in a pack and chirp incessantly until it sensed the others were close by again. Then it began developing a twitch in its neck that eventually caused its neck to curl under its body with bill pointed up. Even though with help it could eat, drink and swim like the others, I was concerned about its safety and wellbeing once they began to free range outside the barn. I didn’t want it to get stuck somewhere, get left behind or be picked off by a predator because of its issues. After a quick and humane euthanasia, I studied the crest and the skull carefully. There was a hole in the skull, about a quarter to half inch diameter and it appeared that the brain had been growing at a faster rate than the bone, which meant the edges of the hole were pressing on brain tissue. One duck amongst many is not a sample size, but it led me to a hypothesis that I would like to study further. I’m not willing to cull any ducks that are happy and healthy and haven’t lost any to predators (hopefully won’t, knock on wood!!) so it’s still a hypothesis: Does every Crested duck have a hole in its skull beyond the soft part every duck hatches with? Does the size of the hole have to do with homozygous genes for being crested and does the size affect the duck’s wellbeing? and the part I’m most excited to learn about: Does the hole in the duck’s skull close with time and age?

This last part I can observe externally with my recent hatches of Crested ducklings because as opposed to my other Cresteds, these duckies are colorful. As they grow, I can observe externally what color the crests are. If the crest feathers remain a duckling or juvenile color, it should support the theory that the hole closes with age. This difference should be most apparent in my male Mallard (Gray) pattern ducklings, which hatch stripey gray, develop into dark brown juvenile colors, then eventually their mature adult feathers with a green head and silver body. I still have a few months to observe my oldest Mallard guy, Borussia to see what color his crest eventually becomes.

My other Crested babies also have duckling-colored poofs for now, but their mature head feathers won’t be so different as in the Mallard pattern.

Like our Dutch traders, people for a long time have been selecting mutations as traits indicative of a breed standard. Mutations are what we call differences that happen at a genetic level that are sometimes expressed as a trait. All mallard-based ducks are capable of having a mutation that results in a visible crest, like Aurélien:

Muscovy ducks do not produce crests, or at least this is a commonly held assumption as I’ve never seen anyone attempt to rebuff that or study Moulard/Hinny ducks (mallard-muscovy hybrids) to see. Crested turkeys are possible, but so far it seems it is a skull defect that grows feathers and is never an inherited trait. On my trip to a wild goose farm in Europe, I discovered a crested goose, which I assume follows the same rules as ducks (either naturally occurring or inherited like Roman Tufted geese).

Even without databases and genetic sequencing, people hundreds of years ago figured out that selecting animals with a desired trait and breeding them to each other gave a good chance of that trait both being expressed and passed on, rinse and repeat for generations.

A non-duck example that I have experience with is our parking lot kitten we adopted, Isa. When I picked her up, I noticed she had no tail. While this can sometimes happen due to injury, she was perfectly healthy with no scarring so she was born this way. Having worked in the veterinary field with tailless cats that had incontinence or digestive issues, I was concerned. Observing her closely and having her checked out by my vet made me feel better since other than being young, small and likely the first time away from her mom, she is fine. She needed help learning to reliably use the litter box and keep herself clean. She also has an interesting gait, which my husband likens to a bunny hopping around since she uses both back legs at the same time unlike regular cats.

These cats are called Manx cats because many of them were intentionally bred without tails (trait selection) on the Isle of Man. Limiting genes to selected traits is much easier on an island than elsewhere because of a limited gene pool with progressively less diversity. An evolutionist would say traits that get selected and passed on are what make that specific animal successful. The Manx example could be explained as a limited set of genes because of being on an island, although there is manmade influence on the selection of those traits. The same could be argued about crested ducks - did the crests actually make them genetically more successful, or was their success attributed to a trait considered attractive to people who became invested in selecting for and passing on that trait?

I love to use Pug dogs as examples of trait selection by humans, since a small dog with eyes that easily pop out of their sockets prone to obesity really would not equal genetic success ‘in the wild’. However, these traits were attractive to humans that kept Pugs around and constantly selected for these traits through generations.

As my latest crested ducklings grow and mature, I’ve been able to observe and study things I might have missed or not been aware of. The July hatch especially has been important to my two discoveries after publishing my previous article on breeding Crested ducks:

1. Every mallard (Gray) colored male I hatched from this breeding has a crest. Originally I had marked one only from the June hatch as non crested, but as time went by I noticed a tiny, two feather crest on his head. I also have begun thinking that duckling Wrexham, who hatched a very light silvery gray I thought was female Buff Lilac Mallard - is actually a very dilute Mallard male. That would mean that the 7 Mallard pattern ducklings from combined hatches are all male and crested. Does the crest favor males or is it linked to the mallard coloring specifically? I will continue to ponder and document this.

   

2. I originally noticed a very low amount of crested females from these hatches. Of 11 Buff mallard females, I had two Crested I reserved for my program and dna tests, Paris and Gunner. Gunner at hatch had a very small crest and still does. I have since sold one June female and have observed small crests developing on 3/5 of the July females - so corrected equals 5/10 females with crests. As these girls continued developing, one with a very tiny crest seemed to disappear, so I sold her but kept the other two for breeding. I will continue to document this as I rethink my first point that the propensity for crests is linked to the mallard pattern coloring, not sex.

As far as color results from the Crested breeding, it’s still a work in progress. Genetically, White ducks have to be homozygous (two White genes) to be visually White. Breeding White to White produces only White. Frustratingly, though, White ducks are not truly white colored, since they can ‘be’ any color and the double white covers up their underlying color. When I calculated the color results from these hatches using the drake colors possible, it gave me Black Bibbed (Black Swedish) for Cayuga Getafe + White Crested and sex-linked ducklings for my Standard Buff drakes + White Crested. These were Mallard (Gray) males, Blue Mallard (Blue Fawn) males, Buff Lilac Mallard females or Buff Chocolate Mallard females. I tried to distinguish between these last two at hatch which is virtually impossible. The females hatch in yellow tones, some with eyestripes much like my Buffs which have no relevance on sex or future color. So I grouped all yellow babies from this breeding into ‘Buff mallard female’ category regardless of crest. I dna tested four exemplars, one from each color, to check the sex link and if I had been correct about color assessment at hatch. Mallard and Blue ducklings at hatch were male and the two yellow ducklings were female. I probably should have tested Wrexham, but didn’t want to spend the money on it and the results likely would have confused me. As Wrex develops, he is getting body feathers the color and pattern of Mallard male Borussia despite being much lighter and silvery at hatch which made me think female.

One of the June females has also developed away from Paris, Gunner and her two sisters from her same hatch. I go back and forth on if she’s a Lilac Bibbed or actually a Splash color. I named her Chanel because she truly is lovely, unique and fancy. Is she actually the Buff Lilac mallard vs her sisters the Buff Chocolate?

I had to restudy White genes and consider that perhaps because of that, the color calculator is not fully accurate. I’m carefully observing and documenting growth and feather color of the ‘Blue Mallard’ males I hatched, regardless of crest. For now, as juveniles and ducklings, they look more like Blue Bibbed (Blue Swedish) than Blue Mallard or Blue Fawn, its name in Call duck colors.

Show time! I bit the bullet and signed up some of my birds for an open poultry show. This time I will be showing three drakes:

I spoke with an organizer and she said that even though Borussia does not fit the APA standard for either White or Black, I could put him in the show just for exhibition purposes without expecting him to win anything. This is my goal, to get judges to look at my birds as well as visitors to the show. None of my other birds fit the bill (haha) to be shown yet, either because of age (my more interesting colored crested ducklings aren’t fully feathered for another few weeks) or issues with the standard (my Crested ladies have developed speckling on their feet and bills that wouldn’t conform). Perhaps in a few months - the Stock Show is coming up and has a much larger audience than this show.

A big reason for this effort is to encourage more people to dream and perfect ‘breeds’ of ducks. We shouldn’t be limited to the development done decades or centuries ago by breeders or what a dusty piece of paper limits a showable duck to. Breeds and standards were created when the rare became standardized and we should definitely keep dreaming and creating with all of the resources we have at our disposal. My dream of a Crested Blue Mallard duck that was medium sized, dual purpose and great for backyard flocks is one step closer! What is your dream??

I had a two-pronged goal for my Cresteds, 1) Develop a Crested Blue Mallard & Apricot Mallard flock and 2) Recreate the Black Crested duck into a flock. I highly suggest before reading more that you brush up on color genetics here.

Crested White ducks are available at multiple hatcheries and sometimes get sent to your local feed store if you’re extremely lucky! This is how I got my Crested group started and 3/4 were females (4th didn’t make it, unknown if male or female). The internet lore about Cresteds is that they’re ornamental, not broody, females get their Crests pulled out while mating and that they’re deadly to breed. I’ll go into more detail later, but will go ahead now and dispel all of those.

My Crested girls lay a large white egg, every day, and usually in the same place [an approved place inside the barn vs my Cayuga Leganés who loves to hide her eggs in the 2.5 acre pasture and moves her nest when I or critters find them]. They have not been broody for the year+ of their life, until very recently when the duck ladies held a secret meeting to all go broody at once and my turkey hens overheard and agreed. At the time of posting, I have Raja duck sitting on Bob’s turkey eggs , Fio duck sitting on 11 turkey eggs while turkey Bill was sitting on four duck eggs [I had to do a ninja switcheroo while Bill was stretching her legs to make sure the correct species was sitting the eggs] and two of my three Crested ladies squished into a nest with one golfball in it [yes, you read that right]. The golfball is a placeholder so I can easily collect their eggs every day, but in their urge to sit, they haven’t noticed their eggs disappear every morning after I arrive and the golfball demands a mother! I do have the wooden fake nest eggs that work well, so well in fact, that several of my hens and my ducks were attempting to sit on them, either preventing them from continuing to lay or causing temperature fluctuations in brooded eggs. So those are literally shelved for now, maybe one day I’ll toss them outside to play a bad trick on the resident crows [they LOVE eggs, but keep hawks away] or the resident skunk [that’ll have to be another post].

I think my extreme luck at getting so many females from the feed store is because of the third persistent internet lie-lore! lore…that is: males injure female Cresteds by gripping their crest feathers when mating. Hatcheries do a good business selling sexed males because of this myth, since their own crests are way out of the way during mating. I ended up purchasing a sexed Crested White male, to help add the genes I wanted [from a separate hatchery than the one that supplies feed stores, so I’ll get some nice diversity in the bloodlines].

About a month or so ago, I was perusing Craigslist and found a Crested Cayuga! The lady kept apologizing since neither parent has a crest, but I assured her I WANTED the crest, had been trying for a year to breed for it without success so far. After a few weeks, I determined it was a he and Aurélien will be a great addition to the Crested Black program, as well as providing a comparison of inherited (all of my other Cresteds) vs naturally occurring crests.

So, back to the crests during mating issue…my Crested ladies have been laying eggs since October, but none of them had been fertilized until recently, about two months ago. The girls had plenty of fun fake-mating each other, but would all skedaddle as soon as a drake tried to join the party. I was able to hatch a Blue Bibbed (no crest) - only possible if Blue drake Inter was the dad - in the spring.

Another hatch from ~10 days ago produced a Black Bibbed (no crest, Cayuga Getafe is the only dad possible) and a finally!! Crested mystery mallard duckling. One of my two Standard Buff drakes is the dad of this duckling and it’s the breeding I’ve been attempting forEVER, without my Crested ladies getting the memo. The most recent hatch from two days ago has finally yielded a lot of hatchlings and a wealth of information that informs this post. I have another batch going as well (end of July hatch), mostly Crested eggs with a few turkey and a Leganés egg that all showed development after the first candling YAY! I had to adjust the flock dynamics some because of the drakes piling up on Leganés, so went from Cayuga Getafe, Blue Inter and three Buff drakes down to Getafe and two Buffs. That seems to have settled things down for Leganés and bumped up the fertility of the Crested eggs. Getafe will occasionally chase the Crested ladies, but he is larger than the Buffs and a bit lazy, so it’s never excessive.

The Buff drakes are smaller and faster and usually find the ladies bathing in the pool where the magic happens. Now that the boys are actually mating the Crested ladies, they have less damage to their crests than when they fake-mate, which left bald spots and floating feathers. I think this is because the boys actually grasp their neck to mate, well below their crest, and once they are done in a few seconds, they let go and move on. The girls’ fake-mating would involve gripping the crest and went on for awhile since it wasn’t accomplishing anything. So, injured ladies during mating? Not any more, or less, than what a good flock manager could and should notice and adjust for. Most duck husbandry sites will quote ad nauseam the ‘correct ratio’ of males to females as being 1 to 4 or 5, but that ratio has never worked for me. Fertility rose when I added another drake or two (a little competition is good for Getafe, I guess) and the most experienced duck around - Leganés at the moment, is the most desirable, especially if she is laying eggs or broody.

Now, for the last and most persistent of Crested myths, that they have a lethal gene and are deadly to breed, that they all have difficult lives, neurological problems and it’s unethical to breed them. You will find quotes all over about two Crest genes causing 25% to ‘die in the shell’, neurological defects and some ducklings hatch without crests, but carry these genes secretly to affect future generations. Since Crested ducks have been around since the 1700s (before dna tests, incubators and color calculators) and all major hatcheries here in the US have them for sale, I am skeptical about these numbers. It is possible one study led to these percentages, but the sample size is way too small to draw conclusions about for every Crested duck in existence. Hatcheries would not invest in breeding something that they lost 25-50% of, much less all of the hatcheries to offer them year round. Here is info from Metzer’s site about their Crested breeding strategy and experience [none of the other hatcheries go into this detail]:

Now that I have a good fertility and hatch rate, I can compile my own data to see if it matches or not. Farther down I will discuss and post detailed color information, but for now the maths of this hatch:

Total eggs set: 18 Crested, 4 Cayuga (for reference)

Eggs removed at 7day candle: 2 (cracked between setting and first candle, but were fertilized). Since I candle before setting, I suspect these eggs might come from a female that lays eggs with weak shells despite having the same nutrition as all of my other ducks, a consideration if I solely kept her for breeding vs eating eggs.

Eggs that did not hatch but were fertilized: 1 Cayuga, 4 Crested. Another Crested was not moving days before hatch, so I did an eggtopsy. It is possible this one could have hatched, but who knows. No crest that I could see.

So a crude percentage would be 30% did not hatch from 22 eggs set = 70% hatch rate. Some breeders will quote their ‘hatch rate’ as close to 100%, but that is just considering the eggs that should hatch and do in the last week of incubation, not eggs that didn’t develop, quit or other issues [oops I dropped one while candling] for not having the number of hatchlings equal to the eggs you put in. I had an egg included in the hatch rate that also had a small crack, but it didn’t seem to penetrate the membrane. I put a small piece of masking tape over it and the duckling pipped at the correct end and hatched successfully. I will probably try and salvage any future cracked eggs this way if it’s not affecting the membrane or embryo. A cracked egg would likely bust way before hatch in the wild, but in the incubator and being monitored, it did ok. If I had been able to tape the shells of those two developing eggs, the percentage would be closer to 78%. Another more difficult way to deal with this would be to determine which duck is laying the weak shelled eggs and eat those instead of hatching them. I keep telling myself that the batch in the incubator is the last hatch…yeah, right.

I don’t have a comparison hatch without Cresteds to compare to, but it seems a very similar, if not even better, percentage based on the many hatches I’ve done from my Cayuga and Buff ducks. If fertilized, the eggs that develop likely hatch. I haven’t had weak shells with those hatches, but a good amount of non fertilized eggs and several quitters for whatever reason. The next batch I have of mixed eggs I candled recently and out of 16 Crested eggs, 1 Cayuga and 4 turkey eggs, only 1 of the Cresteds is debatable since it started developing, but may become a quitter. I’ll update the maths on that hatch later.

Color results: Possibilities from the 11 Crested eggs: Black Bibbed (Swedish), Mallard male, Blue Mallard male (this color is also called Pastel or Blue Fawn), Buff Lilac Mallard female or Buff Chocolate Mallard female. Despite having more drakes that are underage yet, only Cayuga Getafe [Black Bib] and my two Buffs [sex-linked Mallard colors] could be the dad. There is a chance of Crest, No Crest and Crest Genes without a crest. I’ve tried to document and guess at which of the four colors I’m looking at, since documentation of these colors at hatch and as ducks develop is missing from the internet (I’ve searched a lot). For my projects, I do not need to keep the Mallard/Gray pattern or any Bibs, regardless of crest. The Blue Mallard male would ideally need a crest, since without it there’s only a chance he carries the genes and it wouldn’t be evident for six+ months. The females would likely be yellow as ducklings and develop into the brown female mallard as adults, with a nuance of lighter (Lilac) and darker (Chocolate). I can likely keep both of these, even if not crested, since the color genes will be there regardless. Telling them apart at hatch is a wild guess, so I decided to dna test a sampling of the colors to see how it matches to the sex link and my guess at color. I will update in a few weeks when dna results come back.

1 Black Bib, MoF, C (male or female if not sex-linked and crest or no crest visible)

1 Mallard, M, C

2 Blue Mallard, M, NC & C

3 Buff Lilac Mallard, F, 2 C & 1 NC

4 Buff Chocolate Mallard, F, 1 C & 3 NC

Maths for Crests: 54% Crest and 45% No Crest from a C&NC parent breeding. The Crest gene is supposed to be dominant, which is shown here, but by a slim margin.

I decided to dna test one from each of the color patterns I thought there were represented:

‘Borussia’ Mallard male [from the previous hatch, so not included in the maths above since we’re just looking at color here]. This color is semi-dark at hatch, but lightens up as it dries, prominent eye stripes and two-tone feet (brown and orange). With age takes on a grayish hue:

‘Porto’ Blue Mallard male. Dark at hatch and more solid color over the body, yellow underneath. Two-toned feet (black and orange):

‘Paris’ Chocolate mallard female. These were pretty impossible to tell apart and varied a lot in their coloring, so I chose Chocolate for any that had faint eye stripes or were a deeper tan in color. Feet were orange, with a faint two tone (brown) on some, but not readily observable:

‘Gunner’ Lilac mallard female. Yellow body and any hint of silver anywhere made me choose Lilac for these. Feet were solid orange or very faintly two-toned (dark gray almost black):

The problem child [there’s always one, right?] - taped eggshell duckling - I’m really stumped as to what color to call it, but settled on Lilac mallard. ‘Wrexham’ has a Crest, split in two crests and because she’s been babied will stick around in my flock, but won’t be dna tested. She’s smaller than the rest and hatched last, despite being feisty she is currently separated from the others on a heating pad so she doesn’t get trampled. Her color seems very similar to the eggtopsied duckling that was very light, almost silvery so perhaps it’s just a variation on the Lilac part of the mallard:

Also not keeping or dna testing is the Black Swedish ducklings (2 so far). The older one was not crested, but the one from this batch had a nice sized crest for being from a NC&C breeding:

Second Crested hatch results:

Total eggs set: 16 Crested, 1 Cayuga and 4 turkey

Eggs removed after candling (fertilized but quit before hatch): 7 Crested

Hatch rate: 59% Lower than the first batch with less eggs, but that’s to be expected with these eggs laid later in the hen’s cycle and during higher outdoor temps - even though fertilized, more developed but quit before hatch.

Color/Crest results: For these results, I can add in the two Crested eggs Cayuga Fiorentina hatched in the barn, for results from 11 Cresteds in this second batch:

Mallard: 4 Crested

Blue Mallard: 1 C, 1 NC

Buff Mallard: 5 NC

The Crested rate out of 11 is then 45% and 55% for Non Crested (backwards from the first hatch?).

Next update: DNA test results - will post here soon. [The post office lost my feather samples, so I had to resubmit samples]. Finally - results are in - see below:

Borussia - Crested Mallard Male

At hatch: dark body, two-tone brown and orange legs, prominent eye stripes. As he develops, I initially got nervous about the brown juvenile feathers in along his body, since adult mallard males are supposed to have a silvery gray body, not brown. After researching (the little bit that there is) pictures of juvenile wild mallards, the brown body color is normal while growing and during eclipse plumage as opposed to the drakes’ adulthood and breeding colors, known as nuptial plumage.

Porto - Crested Blue Mallard (Blue Fawn) Male

Since I was familiar with Blue color ducks from my sex link Cayugas hatch, the Blue mallard pattern was easy to distinguish. A telltale difference from the Mallard (Gray) pattern was two-toned legs that were black and orange. The body color seems to remain a solid grey-blue and the lighter eye circles are present instead of stripes. Bill color is random, since I have hatched other Blue Fawns, crested and not, and the bill color varies amongst them, but stays similar to when they hatch.

Paris and Gunner - Buff Mallard Females

Since the dna could not tell between Chocolate or Lilac Buff Mallard, it confirmed that the buff mallard females were easily distinguished at hatch as females, but since either color female works for my breeding program, it’ll still take time and hatch results to try and determine which is which. In the gallery below I’ve included other buff mallard females as well to see the feather development as they age:

Last and probably least (especially in Wrexham’s case), the Crested Black Swedish developing juvenile feathering and the puzzling case that is Wrexham amongst her second duckling group. The non crested Swedish I hatched earlier was a large and bossy duckling I assumed male until she started quacking. She lost practically her entire white bib when her juvenile feathers came in. This younger and crested Swedish has kept its Bib although the edges are not as sharp as when it hatched. I didn’t dna test Wrexham, but am still considering her a Buff Mallard unless it’s a Mallard male very diluted. For now, Wrexham will remain with me since her growth is still very delayed compared to her age group. She’s been shuttled down to the next duckling group as her siblings were picking on her and twice her size. She does well with the younger ducklings and resists efforts on my part to separate her from their pen so she can free range, so back she went.

An interesting thing I noticed that requires more study is the low number of Crested females from these hatches. From a total hatched of 21 sex-linked crested eggs (excluding the Swedish), these are the maths:

Males: 9/21 or 43%. Crested males: 78% Non Crested males: 22%

Females: 12/21 or 57%. Crested females: 25%. Non Crested females: 75%

I don’t have a percentage of males and females hatched from a homozygous pairing like Metzer’s breeding strategy, so perhaps this is a normal ratio from a Crested and Non Crested breeding.

Thanks for joining me on this Crested duck breeding journey! I will likely update on a different post as this one is very long and image-heavy, but satisfying after many months of planning and dreaming!

Having hatched a few rounds of ducklings (naturally and artificially) and bought ducklings (shipped to me or locally from a store), I decided to test this out. I wanted a fun ‘research’ project with nothing really to prove, just observation and analysis. I would compare several groups of ducklings:

1) Store-bought ducklings. These are probably what most people would end up with, are artificially incubated and then shipped out, so no momma present. My sample for this group were the random ducklings I acquired to keep my lone duck company when I kept losing ducklings to a snake in the barn [since eliminated] and my Crested White ladies. The CWs are the best example because I couldn’t account for the age of the other ducklings at the time I got them (two Rouen rejects and two Pekins that had been discounted because they had been sitting there a few weeks).

2) Shipped hatchery ducklings. Probably the second way someone would get ducklings, artificially incubated so no mother present, either. Hatchery ducklings were how I started my flock with Cayugas, Pilgrim geese and my newest purchase, a Crested White male [I will HAVE my Crests!] and two Saxony males to add more body to my ducks.

3) Ducklings incubated and hatched in house. I’ve done this a few times, just to have ducklings, attempt sex-linked ducklings and as reference egg buddies for my goose or turkey eggs*.

4) Naturally incubated ducklings, turkey mom. I have some determined turkey hens that love hatching out ducks! This has happened twice now with my hen, Bob (she hatched out The Intrepid & Queen Anne’s Revenge-Cayugas and since, Buff Couscous). Another turkey hen, Maggie, is currently sitting on a mix of turkey and duck eggs.

5) Naturally incubated ducklings, duck mom. Finally! I haven’t had any of my ducks really commit to being broody [side tangent…is this a breed thing? Is it a husbandry thing, or a combo of those two?] until this spring (2025). I have tried tweaking the husbandry aspect since my Cayugas will attempt to lay and sit out in the pasture where it isn’t safe, so none have brooded successfully. My Buffs are consistent rockstars for laying eggs, but have never shown any interest in sitting [the Buff drakes, on the other hand are micromanagers and regular inspectors of all nests and eggs, to a fault. I haven’t figured this out yet]. The Crested ladies are also rockstars for eggs, but they haven’t all been fertilized consistently to even begin attempting brooding. One of them, Gullit, decided that a half-empty bag of shavings she had to jump into was a great place for a nest. I’m hoping they’re fertilized since I know exactly which duck they’re from, but despite a Blue Bib (Swedish) duckling I hatched from an unknown hen’s egg, they possibly aren’t fertilized. The only way this duckling was possible was from my Blue drake, Inter mating a Crested White.

This duckling however, had no crest, no matter how much I wanted it to [side tangent…how many ducklings are hatched without a crest from one non-crested parent?]. It would be interesting to see if this duckling carried any potential for crests, but being Bibbed (the Bib gene is very dominant and I only want solid colors in my ducks moving forward) it found a new flock.

This all changed this spring when I had four hens go broody! I had wanted to compare if the tendency to go broody was genetic or could be ‘taught’, depending on how the ducks themselves were hatched. The first one to Say Yes to the Nest was Maggie, my Royal Palm hen. She was artificially hatched by me in April 2024 and decided to sit on some of her eggs and some of my Cayuga Leganés that she kept adding to the same nest. Her nest was successfully located in a corner of my horse’s stall with flake shavings.

The ducks were the next to sit, Buff Couscous chose a mixed straw/hay/shavings tall nest inside the mesh box I put all my littles in to keep them safe. Cous had been hatched by Bob and spent time in that box growing up.

My two Lilac Cayugas chose to nest together inside a large plastic kennel with mostly straw and some hay from the bales stored nearby. Fiorentina (5/24) is less committed than Raja (7/24) because she will leave the nest for most of the day and lately even at night Raja has not allowed her to stay on the nest. These Lilacs were incubated and hatched by me as part of my sex-linked duckling project.

So far there seems to be an age component to the broodiness - young mothers are perhaps less experienced, but more idealistic? I do have other eggs being laid: Leganés, the Cresteds and Fio in the barn, turkeys Bill & Bob in the pasture [unless I find these eggs fast, they get eaten so neither has collected enough to sit] and my Pilgrim goose, Veronica. The geese usually share a stall with the ‘Darkwing Ducks’ (my nickname for the ducks I will need for Black Crested ducks: Black, Blue and Lilac). This year, though, the geese’s second year of laying, they have been both more productive and more protective of the nest, so the ducks were moved out to gen pop. I have had to do a ‘fun’ dance of adding goose and duck eggs to already running incubators (staggered hatching) to account for fertilized eggs not being wasted. So far I’ve hatched 3 ganders (out of her first 7 eggs) and another 4 from the next 7 are set to hatch end of this month. She also has another 6 in the nest currently in some stage of development since she sits the nest, but only during the night. Eek - not the best for Pilgrim goose management, but I wanted to see if she would go broody. That makes 20 eggs, which should be half of what she’s capable of laying, but we’ll just have to see what happens. Pilgrims are threatened and notoriously have low fertility.

Waterproofing of feathers

Poultry groom themselves by stimulating the oil gland [the Uropygial gland] near the base of their tail and spreading the sebum [oily/waxy secretion] on their feathers. The slang term for using this part in the kitchen is the ‘Pope’s nose’ and is some people’s favorite part and hated by others (I’m in this group). The sebum provides shine while repelling dust, parasites and moisture. Turkeys round out their grooming by dust bathing and spending time preening: fluffing up their feathers, removing damaged feathers, picking at pores or specific feathers and running their beak down feathers to clean them. Waterfowl will bathe in water then finish grooming out of the water by stimulating the gland then using their bill and head to rub the oil on their back, flicking their tails and wings to fully dry and using their bill to either wet or dry areas like their belly and chest. Personally, I think that water is key to stimulating waterfowl to groom, regardless of how they’re hatched and raised. In grown ducks that don’t have access to deep, clean water to bathe, the gland can stop being useful. These birds have an unkempt and greasy look to them that leads to the name of this condition, ‘Wet Feather’ disease. The treatment is to offer deep, clean water and quality nutrition like for a molting bird. I also think an important part of the stimulation to groom has to mimic ponds in the wild: deep, cold water and warm, sunny rocks nearby. I try to stage this with my adult birds as well as my babies. The waterfowl also enjoy the splashy noises made by running water as well as things that float in the water, especially if they are edible! What starts as clean water inevitably and very quickly becomes the opposite if you have ducks, so even though they love trolling the bottom for edible things that sink (grapes!!!), putting food in the water makes it nasty fast.

All of my babies begin with their bills dipped in vitamin water and I have to visibly see them swallow it. Wetted pellets topped with power starter (flaxseed, chia, yeast and seaweed) are offered free choice all the time. Water is offered in progressively larger dishes with Kaytee Bird Greens floating in it and if available, fresh greens from my yard (grasses, dandelions, sourgrass - never anything with chemical treatments). The Bird Greens are chopped very small since it’s for pet birds, but the sight of them floating stimulates curiosity at first - they peck at the water - followed by enjoying the taste. Anything from the yard needs to be shredded smaller, but the idea is also that the ducks use the water to help them eat the plants. My goslings are the only ones that will attack entire blades of floating grass very happily, their serrated bills are like a tiny sawmill and they love chewing on plants.

So perhaps it’s this water dish with floaties setup that lends itself to my situation, but I have not been able to keep my baby birds out of the water. For turkeys this is hardly applicable, they are very dainty around the water once they actually figure out how to drink it! As adults, turkeys prefer shallow, wide dishes of water to cool their feet in when it’s hot or shallow running water to walk in. The waterfowl, on the other hand, is a constant changing of water to fresh because of the way they eat by wetting their food and constantly in & out of the water dish. I have seen setups of water drinkers (I am not a fan of these, perhaps because I don’t keep chickens, which are the only species these are useful for), water dishes on grates and paint trays, water slides, etc. I can somewhat contain the mess in the brooder by putting water dishes inside other larger shallow dishes until they can free range - which conveniently teaches them to step in & out of the pool as adults. I fill up a cat litter box with water for them to swim in when they’re one week old with floaties, in full sun for five minutes and warm rocks to dry off in nearby. This activity runs from acceptable to absolute joy - usually expressed by the Cayugas acting like submarines.

In the barn there are separate containers and areas for drinking vs. swimming water. No ‘swimming’ water is allowed inside the barn or overnight because of the wide swath of mess the ducks make continuously during the night. Drinking water is in buckets that are short enough to drink from but too narrow to ‘get in’ and will still have a puddle of mess around them every morning.

I have noticed water preferences as adults that may factor in. These are my experiences and not critical or reflective of entire ‘breeds’ - do your own research and let me know what you find.

Cayugas: live in the water as ducklings, very active ducklings, less so as adults.

Buffs: ambivalent about water both as ducklings and adults, they seem to like walking great distances.

Crested Whites: ambivalent as ducklings, but as adults they love bathing, being sprayed and sprinkled. They come running whenever I have a hose! Not as active as the others, but more personable and curious.

Saxony: I currently only have four-week old males, who have brooded with a CW male from the hatchery and two older Splash ducks I hatched here. They were ambivalent until being moved out to the barn and the addition of the Splashes. Probably because of access and imitating them, they are in the water a lot during the day swimming actively or sometimes just sitting inside the water (they have several depths and sizes of water pools to chose from).

Pilgrim geese: Other than my parent pair I raised inside then moved to the barn, I haven’t kept goslings long enough to observe. The goslings I brood inside will step and stand in their water dishes, but aren’t interested in swimming as such or deep water. As adults, the geese will bathe a couple of times a day, mate in cold, deep water and prefer water that is fresh and clean (that doesn’t last long with ducks, my geese will usually stand in the pool while it’s filling and keep the ducks away until they’re finished bathing). The geese don’t swim per se, they are very intentional and consistent with bathing - dunking their neck in the water and splashing it down their back. If it’s very hot out, the geese will float in the water without being very active to stay cool. As juveniles, I felt it was important because of the heat and for cleanliness/grooming to dunk my geese in the pool, they wouldn’t climb in on their own like the ducks. After two or three times of this, they would do it on their own, but this was like kick starting stimulating the gland and them cleaning their feathers.

I shelved this article for about a month while I waited for the various eggs to hatch, under hens or inside the incubator. My reasoning was to be able to compare well the different groups of ducklings and because I had recently gotten discouraged about writing at all. I had reached out to a popular bird image site, offering pictures of rare colored ducks, from hatch to adulthood and the visible results of what the duck color calculator had predicted. Despite acknowledging that he “doesn’t know anything about duck genetics”, he said I was wrong and my duck images “weren’t a breed” and wouldn’t be posted on his site. This kind of doubling down on ignorance is not useful to anyone. I strive to learn, not only through research but experience as well and then share what I’ve learned and experienced with any others that also want to know or learn - especially young students. I hope this is evident in my other articles, about agriculture and our food supply, duck color genetics and volunteering with high schoolers. So I decided to finish this article and keep writing [I’m currently working on compiling data on hatching Crested ducklings and comparing it to the internet lore that keeps getting circulated, discussing trait selection and mutations that become selected as a breed standard - think Manx cats or Araucana ‘rumpless’ chickens].

Updates on the duckling groups:

1. Store-bought ducklings. I haven’t done this for awhile, except a few weeks ago I stumbled upon a Crested Cayuga duckling for sale on Craigslist and jumped on it. The breeder does not have any Crested ducks and was confused as to ‘how that happened’.

   

   These ducklings (I bought a non Crested sibling as well, for company even though they quickly became a flock with my three weeks older Buff ducklings) were artificially incubated and brooded in a plastic tub in her garage. Being five of them and already over three weeks old, there wasn’t much room left in the brooder and they kept overturning their food/water dishes. Here their setup was a shavings filled box [closed at night but open all day] with a fenced area around it that included food and the litter box full of water. They were very shy and flighty (still kind of are), but having the Buff ducklings show them the ropes really helped. At first they wouldn’t eat my food and would only drink from the edge of the litter box. Eventually they did learn to eat the grass clippings I would put in the box before filling it every morning and would get in to swim. Key factors to consider for this group: age (it’s easier to teach younger ducklings to swim) and husbandry: what do they have access to after hatching, while brooding and then as they get bigger and begin to free range?

2. Hatchery ducklings: My CW male and two Saxonys are definitely latecomers to the swim party. They weren’t as enthusiastic as my other ducklings have been, but with age/size/time they have actually come to enjoy being sprinkled on the lawn, sprayed with the hose when it’s hot and my Saxonys will climb in to troughs to swim. Triple digit weather has helped them enjoy the water more than as ducklings and my CW male does like being sprayed, but swimming not as much.

3. In-house hatchlings: I have my brooding strategy well defined by now and my ducklings seem to all enjoy progressively bigger water to swim in. The last step before free ranging is the fenced pen with a litter box, one paver on the outside and one on the inside, which teaches them how to get in and out using rocks. The troughs and pools I have for my birds have rocks inside and outside like this, so this teaches them how to get in and out while little.

   

5. (Yes, I know). I skipped ahead to duck-mom hatchlings because I have less to say about these guys. After being broody for such a long time, my duck moms love to bathe and splash, and the ducklings follow along. For my setup (water dishes), quite a few ducklings got stepped on regularly by their mom, but no one was truly injured. In the wild, I’m sure moms use a beach type entry and exit from the water, but I don’t have that here.

4. Turkey-mom ducklings: This has always been a fascinating topic for me to explore, thanks to my industrious turkey hens that love brooding. I had been monitoring and candling the eggs and Maggie was down to one duck egg that quit late in the game before hatching. Raja was sitting on a dozen! duck eggs, so I borrowed one of hers and replaced the bad egg for Maggie. She successfully hatched out a Buff duckling and was very protective of it. That went well for about a week, when I let them start ranging. Maggie being a turkey walked extensively (one long legged turkey stride was about a million for duckling) and I was concerned that duckling wasn’t eating or drinking enough - too much time spent walking! The duckling was also very confused, it would avoid the other ducklings and would only respond to turkey calls - basically, it didn’t know how to be a duck. So I moved it inside the fenced area with the other ducklings and Raja, Maggie on the outside but within eyesight and hearing. It took a few days to adjust to being a duckling, then it was not distinguishable from the others. The times Bob has hatched ducklings, I had left them all enclosed together for much longer because it was winter, so this was the first time I could see the too much turkey trot issue as well as not knowing how to be a duck.

So, after all that, I decided that the waterproofing of duckling feathers is not what is key. Once they dry off after hatching, they can get wet and do have some buoyancy. What ‘mom’ provides them, whether turkey, duck, or human, is safety around water. This includes entry and exit points as well as avoiding deep water without a respite. In the wild, this makes sense as mom and ducklings use a beach to get in and out and avoid deep water where snapping turtles and fish lurk under the water. Once they begin bathing, they are stimulated to dry off and groom themselves, activating their own oil glands.

So don’t be afraid to let your ducklings splash, swim and explore, as long as they are safe and have a warm area to dry off in afterwards!

Footnotes

*A friend with a lot of experience taught me to add ‘reference duck eggs’ to my goose hatches. This means adding some duck eggs in with whatever other eggs you’re incubating. The idea is that if other eggs develop and not duck = duck eggs aren’t fertilized. Duck eggs develop and others don’t = other eggs aren’t fertilized. No eggs develop = incubator is the problem. Ducks are very hardy and have the same time to hatch as the bigger birds at 28+ days (chickens wouldn’t work, being 21 days to hatch and delicate as chicks). The other benefit is that the ducklings that hatch are buddies for the others, in case you only get one to hatch. Goslings need buddies since they are very social and highly intelligent. Turkeys greatly benefit from other chicks demonstrating how to eat and drink (yes, turkeys are special - not dumb, but definitely high maintenance compared to the waterfowl!). This is also beneficial once they start moving on to new flocks, no one goes alone.

Paté is generally understood to be a meat paste made from liver (pork, duck being typical) while foie gras (French for ‘fatty liver’) is waterfowl liver that has stored up tremendous fat reserves. Ideally, the best foie comes from geese - each liver comparable to a duck, is larger. The fat storage process in the liver has been around for centuries and was noticed in Egypt as the birds would gorge themselves with food to make the long migration for the winter. The Egyptians and later, the Romans learned how to forcefeed captive waterfowl to achieve a similar result in domesticated geese, usually with refined grain-type feeds. A normal liver is dark red with well-defined lobes, whereas fatty foie from grains takes on an ivory tone and is enlarged. Foie’s flavor is also less intense with a soft texture, compared to liver which has a distinct organ flavor and can be tough. Modern foie farms combine the forcefeeding with corn and a rigid tube called ‘gavage’ together with extreme confinement to attempt to create foie. These techniques are understandably heavily condemned by those who know about them, despite the assurances by producers that they are in some form - humane. This is done on ducks as opposed to geese, simply because producers can pack more ducks than geese into a small area.

The only way this topic is tolerable to me is to distance myself a bit and attempt to view it from a conservation and producer standpoint. My family and I are mostly plant-based, except for special occasions (Texas BBQ is a requirement when we have out of town visitors!) and times when flock management is required or planned, like Thanksgiving turkey. I love cheese too much to be fully vegan, usually have an abundance of eggs around, and do enjoy occasional meats if they are as natural and humane as possible. Unfortunately, the demand for two of my favorite occasional treats - jamón serrano and Texas beef BBQ - can only be met by factory farming…or can it? Part of my journey to visit La Patería de Sousa and the interview with owner Eduardo Sousa was to explore the answer to that question.

Eduardo runs La Patería from his family’s 40 hectares (99 acres) in Southern Spain, roughly between Badajoz and Sevilla. He also has solar panels, water collection and treatment facilities, native olive, oak and fig plants on his land and offers sections of it to cattle farmers to lease to keep the plant growth controlled. His family has been using the same husbandry and processing techniques learned from Jewish settlers in Spain since 1812. La Patería has a separate Tienda - store - in a physical location as well as online that sells goose broth, whole carcasses, lard, eggs, rillette (deboned canned meat), cured breast meat, and of course, foie. That is, if you’re lucky or pre-ordered, since I have never seen their online store have stock available!

The day we chose to visit was a Tuesday, involved an eight-hour round trip drive from Madrid and was cool and rainy. We used main highways skirting Badajoz, then dipping down into a small, quaint town and through his main gate (with instructions: don’t let the cows out). Eduardo generously received us in the drizzle with umbrellas, a large basket of whole corn to toss at the geese and his friendly Spaniel. Driving up to the main house was interesting considering our diesel-powered SUV had to navigate creeks, cattle guards and a muddy slope up to the house and geese pastures. Even though Eduardo has been interviewed multiple times by famous chefs and business blogs, our interview was a laid-back conversational stroll amongst the geese. I took notes on both the questions and answers, but this post is not a transcription word for word.

At first we introduced ourselves, explained my work with my own geese and livestock conservancy and rehashed the basic husbandry techniques I had gleaned from investigating La Patería. The geese are wild Greylag geese whose migration pathways run near Eduardo’s farm, called in by geese already there, they land to eat and nest on his property. They freely eat the wild grasses, forbs and flowers that grow as well as fallen acorns, olives and figs from native trees. They are free to move between pastures, fly away or nest as they please. Eduardo offers them handfuls of whole corn to whiten the color of their livers and so they don’t startle at his presence moving through the pastures. Once a year on a moonless night, Eduardo chooses a group of geese to process after the winter has begun, but before the geese fly off to migrate. His products for sale and personal use come from this one-time harvesting of the geese. He allows some geese to migrate or remain on his property year-round to nest, raise goslings and after a few months, call in more migrating geese flying by.

Are these all wild geese?

Some of them are wild and they tend to be smaller. They can also cross breed with domestic geese, I have seen them come in with more white feathers due to breeding with German domestic geese. After a generation or so, with good nutrition and safety, the geese tend to get larger. I even had these ducks fly in - I know who their owner is and asked if he would like them returned and he said, No, they’ll only fly back to your property anyway.

How do you know which is male or female? Is there a difference in the carcass or foie size or quality based on sex, size or breed?

I can’t tell from their color which is male or female. The females will go off to make a nest and lay eggs, sometimes two females will nest together and a male will stay near them to help protect the nest and goslings. She lays about 40 eggs from which a dozen will hatch and she will raise. There are predators here that will go after eggs or goslings, not usually after the larger geese. I was warned by a neighbor one year that I had a ‘buho real’ (Eurasian Eagle-Owl) flying around at night, so I had to install a strobe light pointed up to keep the owl away without the light upsetting the geese. I have not noticed differences in the foie based on anything other than the nutrition and freedom the geese get here on my farm.

Do you collect eggs to incubate?

I have an incubator, but have never used it. I can see where the geese go to hide their eggs, but don’t like disturbing the nest. I don’t select any breeding pairs, groups or breed traits, since that happens naturally by the geese themselves.

How do you choose the group for processing?

The night of processing has to be a very dark or moonless night, after the cold has begun so they have been eating a lot, but before they fly away. I have already observed and selected a group based on their age and how they bed together at night. We shine an LED spotlight at the geese and this dazes them, almost like hypnosis, but we still move among them very quietly to not upset them. You have to watch out for their wings and beaks - one bit me on the cheek and I had a large bruise for weeks. They are all processed here by me, my family and workers I usually hire from nearby that know what to do. The group can be anywhere from 300 geese during a drought year to 1,000 and we work until everything is completed. The down is collected first, plucked by hand, to make filling for jackets or bedding, then the cooked products.

What do the geese eat?

They can eat anything on my property. I had a nice lawn of grass next to the house, but so many geese ate it that it doesn’t exist anymore. We have an old well in the lower pasture with whitewashed walls - since the whitewash has calcium in it, the geese chew on it for their eggshells, so we have to whitewash it again and again. The ‘encinas’ (Quercus ilex or Holm oak) drop acorns that the geese eat. There are also olive trees. Once a year, harvesters from town come with sheets to collect olives. They have to leave the fallen ripe olives for the geese to eat. They keep 2/3rds of the olives and I get 1/3rd to sell or take to a cooperative mill that will press them into oil for me. The geese will eat the fruit but not the olive pits [I ignorantly asked if that makes more olive trees grow, but Eduardo patiently explained that olive trees do not grow from the pits. When I asked how he pruned or cared for the olive trees on his property, he simply said he didn’t do anything to them].

The geese will also eat the figs that grow around my property. I planted some Lupinbush (Lupinus arboreus) for the geese following Mediterranean traditions, since this plant is a legume (nitrogen-fixing) that produces edible beans (but must be properly cooked for human consumption). This particular plant has a yellow flower that also adds to the golden aspect of the foie. [After returning home and researching ‘la lupina’, the Texan in me was thrilled to see that this plant is a family member of our beloved Bluebonnets which I’d always heard were “toxic”, but have never seen my horse or birds show any interest in snacking on. Maybe this year instead of mowing once bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) season is over, I’ll play alkaloid roulette and try cooking some of the beans! Probably for the best that nothing on my farm tries to eat these plants, since blueish foie would be hard to market - like my grey Cayuga eggs.]

You’re surrounded by Iberian ham farms - what do they think of your operation? Are they against what you’re doing here?

Iberian pigs have been here forever and they make good products. However, at some point the quality goes way down to meet the demand and I think jamón has peaked. It used to taste much better and was served with aplomb. That is why I won’t increase production even though demand is very high for my products. A few years ago we decided to increase our prices because demand was so high, thinking it would lower the demand pressure because it cost more. But it didn’t work that way - we still had the same pressure for products and didn’t want to just keep raising the price. We decided to keep production and price the same and focus on just producing a really tasty, quality product. We harvest only once a year and only what that harvest provides. We have a very old ‘secadero’ on the property for hanging and drying hams with a dirt floor. I was very close to renovating it by adding a stone floor when my friend told me not to - the floor sprinkled occasionally with water provides the right humidity for drying hams. We’ll hang goose breast meat in there and it cures just like a ham.

The only ones against what I do are the French [wry smile]. We won the foie taste award in France, competing against farm raised and forcefed foies and they have never been happy about that. The Spanish government does not provide me with any subsidies or help, but they also don’t interfere much, either. The pig operations are ambivalent and I even sell some local Iberian pork products at my store.

Are you worried about Avian Influenza?

This is only a problem for thousands of animals packed into a warehouse. Here, if an animal is sickly, the healthy birds will push it away from the flock. If I notice it doing poorly and isolated, I will make sure food and water is close by. Sometimes the bird will die. But usually it improves and is then ‘inoculated’ to whatever made it sick.

Have you thought of opening another farm like this elsewhere? Have you had any interest in raising geese like this instead of intensive production?

Recently, they opened up the ability to hunt geese in Doñana Park, which is a stop on their migratory routes. The hunters use calls to attract geese and then shoot them with rifles. The geese that don’t get shot learn to be wary - so when they arrive here and hear the real geese calling to them, they take their time to decide to land and stay here, deciding if it’s safe. I was also contacted about starting a farm like this one north of here, but we’re still developing the basic flock to call wild geese in for that area.

After we had conversed a bit around the geese, Eduardo invited us in to try some rice he had prepared with goose meat (recipe below). I had never tried goose meat before and expected either greasy or gamey, but this was neither! Even my 8 year old pickiest eater ever enjoyed it. It’s a family recipe of his that is simple to prepare, but with a depth and variety of flavors.

In that area, because of the Spanish Inquisition, Jews needed to hide the fact they were looking for something kosher to eat that wasn’t pig. Being surrounded by delicious pigs and yet avoiding eating them would raise suspicion and signal them out as Jews. They created euphemisms as well as a market for harvesting and preparing goose while also attempting to use as much of the goose as possible (feather down, meat, lard). As he was stirring the rice, I asked if he ever needed meat if he would grab a goose and harvest it and he said, No…this meat is from the yearly harvest’s rillette:

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, I wouldn’t recommend eating foie or even goose every day. It is to be savored and enjoyed, occasionally.

Footnotes, resources, links:

Let It Brie charcuterie

Gavage on foie farms in France *graphic*

La Patería online main page (video) and store (Spanish)

Chef Dan Barber’s TED talk on foie (English)

Business Insider video about La Patería (English)

Lupinus species plant list

Eduardo’s recipe for rice with goose meat (Spanish) Ingredients: Mixed white and dark goose meat - deboned and cut into small pieces, Olive oil, Red wine, Water, Garlic, Bay leaves, Thyme, Star anise, Black peppercorns, Crushed sweet almonds, Salt, Green and red chopped bell peppers, Onion, Saffron, Medium-grain rice [a rice for paella works perfectly here], Meat broth, Grapes for garnish.

Sauté the veggies in oil and add the goose meat once tender, along with all of the seasonings. Once that is tender and hot, add the broth. Once the broth mixture is hot and flavorful, add the rice, stirring constantly. Don’t overcook the rice [too soft] and serve, garnishing with grapes.

This past year I was able to stretch my wings (intended) in a new way based on my high school-age son and one of his favorite teachers. Apparently, the gift of gab can be genetic and he’d been filling her ear most days with the tales of my flock and projects. He connected us and this teacher of Science (Biology and Anatomy & Physiology) approved a hatching project using my ducks’ eggs during the Spring. I planned to be in class several periods a day, most days of the school week and take the incubator home over the ten days of spring break since no one would be there to check on it.

Unfortunately, only a few of the eggs began to develop and none even got close to hatching. We were all a bit bummed, but I brought my incubator home and went back to the drawing board. I learned a lot of tips and tricks, purchased a Bluetooth temp/hygrometer for inside the incubator and even purchased a second incubator. I went on to hatch out my goose, duck and turkey eggs in several batches over the summer and solidified my status as a hatch addict. My family has gotten used to simultaneous bators running, egg storage and labeling, candling in the dark of night, and - their favorite part - eggs hatching and babies in the brooder.

So when I contacted this teacher again about hatching for the fall classes, she agreed readily with one request - that they be chicken eggs instead of duck, one less week of incubating and chickens are easier to care for (unless we get into that discussion again, I disagree). Since I don’t keep any chickens, I searched for local chicken folks with fertilized eggs. I had to settle for barnyard mixes since most breed producers had shut down production for the season. She selected her earliest Biology class as victims-er, students, and we planned for a hatch the week after Thanksgiving break. This time was a success with 14/22 hatching and one quitter for the A&P class to learn from (details below). These experiences are always very fulfilling to me, as I hope they are for the students, and I’m sure I end up learning more than they do every time.

So, what does this have to do with you? I was hoping you’d ask yourself that and aim for this post to be an encouragement and resource for you, but more importantly a launchpad for your ideas and goals with poultry.

But I’m not a teacher. This one is actually one of the easiest hurdles to overcome. I’m not a teacher or a lecturer, either. My teaching style is to demonstrate as much as possible (with hands on if possible) my skills and experiences and ask a lot of questions of the students. No one enjoys sitting in a presentation where the teacher READS from the screen behind them. We can read, that’s why we’re here… If you like to have notes or a lecture, print them out for the students and let them take their own notes. Let them have the benefit of your presence as experiences and Q&A vs you reading out loud to them. I have learned so much more by listening to the students’ ideas and discussing with them than if I droned on up front. When talking about ducks, my favorite thing to do is to take a few juvenile or adult ducks (bonus points if they look basically the same like my Cayugas) and ask the students to pick them up and determine if they are male or female. Inevitably, the students decide the “loud” duck is the male, as they’ve been conditioned to do because of roosters, for example. Once I explain that the quack is actually distinctive to females (if you ever played Duck Hunter, you were shooting all of the females!), I ask them why they think it’s important for the females to be much louder than males. My favorite response so far and one that I really agree with, was a student saying, she needs to be loud to call her babies and protect them. I always walk away from these hatches with loads of ideas and thoughts, as I hope the students do as well.

Get in contact with your local school and offer to volunteer for a few weeks during the hatch. I am hard pressed to think of a school that would reject an adult wanting to invest in their students. My preferred age group is high school, since they are able to focus a lot better than younger students and are beginning to think about what’s after high school (or should be). That’s why I titled this post ‘hatching out high schoolers’ as a metaphor for helping our youth kick out of their shells and face the world.

Don’t overlook homeschooling groups or families, either, they are usually open to non-traditional methods of learning as well as skills and hands-on experiences that develop their students.

Students today have infinite information available anytime at their fingertips, but they need to be able to determine what is truth in this age of Artificial Intelligence, ‘content creators’, Influencers and Deep Fakes. They also are lacking in most experiential types of learning, since it’s all classroom knowledge without hands-on, the ability to brainstorm, try things, make a few mistakes, and have a mentor to guide them.

Another thing I try to do is take all of my own materials as much as possible, plan each session carefully, and clean up after myself and the students. Teachers have a lot on their plates to provide their own ideas, curriculum, materials, etc. so any little bit helps especially if they don’t have to plan for these activities.

Sample schedules and resources: Remember to coordinate your schedule based on how long things take to hatch (chickens 3 weeks, turkey/duck 4 weeks, Muscovy duck/geese 30+ days), weekend/holiday breaks and setting your eggs early in the week so you don’t have hatchlings over the weekend. Some eggs require more work and maintenance, so are ideal for experienced hatchers, for example turkey eggs too large for the automatic turner tray or goose eggs that need to be misted and cooled every day.

The hens get off the nest to stretch their legs and perform bodily functions (especially in the beginning-they are more committed closer to hatch times), so it’s okay to open the incubator to candle eggs or unplug it long enough to take it between school and home. Find a good spot in your home and at the school that is draft free and relatively mild in temperature. I learned during my failed hatch that the incubator on a table in the middle of the room where the HVAC shut off every day overnight was too cold for eggs to develop. For the second hatch, I put the incubator under cabinets in the same room and on top of a dish drying pad with a Bluetooth meter inside to check the settings. You don’t want your incubator having to work too hard to stay warm, or the temperature fluctuations will affect the eggs. I try to only open the incubator once daily and work quickly. If I have multiple class periods, they get to candle on different days starting when you can see development (First period Monday day 7, Third period Tuesday day 8, etc.).

Day 1: Take incubator to school, get set up and settings adjusted. Discuss types of incubators (cabinet/tabletop, forced vs still air), temp/humidity/ventilation requirements for hatching, Why Poultry? (rapid growth, small size, eggs, meat, feed-to-meat conversion, feathers for clothes/blankets/lures, litter as biofuel).

Day 2: Take fertile eggs to school, candle to check for breaks and air cells, create a Hatch record, set eggs, turn tray and timer, assign an incubator monitor. Discuss ideal eggs for incubating (fertilization, shape/size, shell integrity, unwashed/unrefrigerated/not shipped). Discuss how candling works and what to look for in these early stages where there is no visible development. I usually take extra eggs or the rejects from the selection process for students to crack open. Let the students do this - you’d be surprised at this life skill that several students have not done before! Take a graphic that shows the difference between fertilized and non-what I call ‘Dot or Doughnut’ and have them compare to the real egg yolks to decide for themselves. I always remind them that it’s not clear cut and practicing often is the only way to develop this skill.

Discuss the importance of good record keeping with the hatch log and mark all eggs. I like to have each student pick an egg and write their name on it. They become invested that way, can see it rotating every day, root for it to hatch successfully, and I never have to bring chicks home. I have used Sharpie and color pencil with the same results, with my preference actually for marker because duck eggs have a slimy bloom and the pencil can rub off. Some of the chicken eggs were very difficult to candle and label (Marans?), so having a set of strategies is best over one way of doing things.

I have one student per period that I voluntell to be an incubator monitor. This is usually a student that is very interested, has a knack with animals/machines, can handle responsibility and make decisions for the group. Their job is to daily check the temp and humidity, adjust accordingly, handle the eggs during candling, etc. I contact local Universities or Ag programs and ask for swag for the students - my incubator monitors get the best swag for their efforts and bragging rights.

Day 3: Discuss types of poultry (land/water/ornamental). Discuss breeds (egg/meat/pet production). Discuss Conservancy (factory farming, reliance on 12 crops and 5 types of livestock). Bring eggs, cups and vinegar to make vinegar eggs (they need to sit for 3-4 days). Discuss the action of the vinegar on calcium carbonate, why laying birds need supplemental calcium, the vinegar will even clean the bloom off and it floats to the top.

Day 4: Discuss Farm vs. Business. Discuss Careers - I take an internship ad from a local food distributor showing all of the parts of the business they get to experience as an intern. Don’t like animals? Work in sales or marketing. Don’t like people? Drive the trucks, etc., there is always something the students can aspire to do regardless of their preferences. Open the vinegar eggs [3-4 days after putting them in vinegar or the shells will still be tough] - this is messy but the students love it. Check fertility again or anything interesting (double yolk/fairy egg/meat spots/bacterial or fungal growth).

Day 5: Short video on embryo development (chicken, but the concepts apply). Discuss why things happen when they do - why do they develop feathers before hatching? Why do their eyes develop so early on when they’re inside the egg? Discuss the need for an eye tooth, shadowing, internal and external pipping, why the air cell needs to form, yolk absorption right before hatch, the need for the lack of air to cause the chick to kick its way out, etc. If it’s been 7 days since setting, begin the first candling to check for veins. Throw out any duds (not fertilized) that don’t start developing. Ideally this is done in a darkened area or room and sometimes a small flashlight is better than the candlers on the incubator.

Don’t forget to make notes in your hatch log each time you candle! Discuss why records are important (flock planning, goals, disease, infertility, drops or problems in production).

Day 6: Discuss nesting/brooding/basic needs for young then adult birds. If students want to take chicks home, they are required to write, draw, interpretive dance, whatever, a project on caring for the birds. Parent permission is key, as well as understanding the responsibility and needs of the birds. Baby birds cannot go alone, I send groups of two or more based on what hatches successfully. Keeping a lone chick alive is very difficult, especially for beginners. 10-14 days before hatch are usually needed for the students to plan their project report.

Day 7: Lockdown for the incubator (turning tray out, increase humidity, candle once more to check for quitters, add shelf liner to incubator floor, open vents). This happens 3-5 days before the expected hatch date. Discuss how the hen prepares for the hatch (rarely gets off nest, begins peeping to the chicks, hatchlings and mom will stimulate eggs to hatch all around the same time - why?). If you feel up to it, crack open the quitters and try to determine what day they stopped developing, which can be the answer to why it stopped. I have done this inside a ziploc bag so I can still see what’s inside without risking a stink bomb. I also have started adding plastic shelf liner cut in a circle to the incubator when I take the turn tray out and prepare for hatch; it doesn’t keep the incubator any cleaner, but prevents toes and beaks from getting caught in the slots.

Day 8: You should start seeing signs of hatching (shadowing, internal pip, external pip, zipping, hatch). If you need to candle at this stage, use a flashlight held up to the egg without turning it or removing the egg from the incubator. The eggs should right themselves with the biggest part of the air sac on top if they are jostled, if the sacs formed properly. Work quickly while the lid is off to prevent a lot of heat/humidity loss on the eggs. Chickens and turkeys progress rapidly through hatch stages while ducks can take a long time. Discuss stages of hatching, not removing hatchlings until they are dry and fluffy, yolk absorption and how chicks can survive a few days on it without food and water, hatchlings and hen stimulate the eggs to hatch around the same time - why? and what happens if eggs don’t hatch at the same time. If you need to remove a struggling chick, work quickly with help to remove the chick [and a buddy if you won’t be returning the chick to the incubator] and empty eggshells. The empty shells contain stinky afterbirth and generally just add to the mess, unless you are saving them to send off for dna testing.

Note each chick/egg in the record log as accurately as possible. Discuss the importance of records of hatch success, time, if struggle or not, etc. as it relates to flock management.

Day 9: ID each bird (discuss methods: toe punch, banding, wing bands, record keeping). Each bird now gets their own medical record moving forward, which can include their hatch record if available. Discuss genetics (some of my favorite poultry genetics topics are: color genes [usually come from the male], eggshell color genes [likely from the hen, but if it’s tied into feather color, then does it come from the male?], dominant/recessive genes, etc). Baby birds need to go as groups to homes that are prepared for brooding: heat, containment, substrate, food and water. Troubleshoot as needed: hatching issues [do you get involved in difficult hatches?], medical issues [deformities, bleeding umbilicus, etc.]. I haven’t dealt with these types of issues in the classroom, but I have on my own hatches, and I highly recommend to include students in the decision making process if the opportunity presents itself. There is no better teacher than experience, and experiences are always better with a mentor present.

Approved students get to take home chicks (in groups) at the end of the day. I take a box with a pee pad, Hot Hands underneath, vitamin water and my chick power starter* so they can hang out with the students and be taken home at the end of the day. I do have to say, though, that most of the day they get held by students and rarely spend time in the box! The chicks can also be put back into the incubator overnight to stay warm if needed or if other eggs are still hatching, even though after having food and water they will poop in the incubator**. I show my students how to dip beaks and bills in vitamin water when they exit the incubator and check for them tipping their head back and swallowing to make sure they get some nutrition in early on.

Don’t be afraid to go out and start a hatching project - it benefits you in many ways: investing in our youth and future producers, helping rare breeds survive and duplicate, ensuring genetic diversity and our food supply, etc. Feel free to comment with your thoughts and experiences, and as always,

Happy Hatching!

Footnotes & Resources:

Chicks in the Classroom project by the Livestock Conservancy - documents, schedules, videos [elementary school age]

*Chick power starter: Mix chia seeds, ground flaxseed, turmeric, nutritional or Brewer’s yeast, and a few sprinkles of crumbled Dulse seaweed. In a pinch, you can also scramble an egg as chick food, but very young hatchlings may struggle to eat it. You can also moisten what your flock currently eats (I never buy crumbles as it is mostly dust and wastes my $$, I only use pellets). Remember that poultry will need access to grit relatively soon to aid their digestion, especially if they aren’t allowed to free range and pick up their own grit.

**My least favorite aspect of hatching is cleaning the incubator! They get really nasty between little bitty feathers, bits of shell, afterbirth, poo and other stinky things of undetermined provenance. After a few rodeos, I have resorted to doing the same cleaning process with the same products: Soak well with Clorox bathroom spray the bottom and trays. Clean the inside & outside of the top with canned air (especially the fan/motor and wipe with Q-tips if the feathers are reluctant to be cleaned) followed by a thorough wiping with Clorox Wipes. Gently wipe and clean the fan/motor casing and the hygrometer tip. Allow to air dry. Scrub the soaked parts with an old rag and rinse with very warm water. Scrub the channels for water, water ports and port covers very well with an old rag and Q-tips if necessary. You need to remove hatching ick as well as mineral buildup from the water. Allow to air dry completely. Lubricate the turner stile and tray slot with a neutral oil (clipper/sewing machine oil). This will prevent rust and help the tray pop out easily. Wipe down the cords and charger gently with Clorox wipes. Once everything is fully dry, put it away for the next hatch or go ahead and set more eggs [the preferred method].

Materials: Eggs [a lot! My incubators handle 22 small eggs in the turner tray, less if they are bigger and need hand turning like turkey/goose]. Incubator [your choice, I suggest starting small and with a clear top instead of the styrofoam kinds]. Distilled water for humidity. Bluetooth temp/hygrometer [I have been pleased with a Govee available on Amazon which sends readings to an app on my phone]. Towel/pad for transporting the incubator and underneath. Printed notes, graphics, a way to watch videos on screen. Vinegar eggs: Eggs [different kinds, no need to be fertilized], vinegar, Solo cups, 3-4 days, disposable plates, something to poke open the eggs [plastic utensil], a big trash bag. Brooder, vitamin water, chick food. Masking tape to close the incubator during transport. Sharpies, mechanical or colored pencils. Plastic gloves for opening or handling eggs. Flashlight or incubator candler. Hatch logs or records. Zipties/bands/toe punch. The most critical material needed is your willingness and experience.

3 ripe bananas

1/2 cup softened butter, not melted

1/2 cup white sugar (even better if it’s vanilla sugar, recipe below)

1 room temperature duck egg

1 t vanilla or other flavoring (cinnamon, almond, etc)

1 t baking soda

Heavy pinch salt

1 cup AP flour

1/2 cup bread or cake flour

1/2 cup mini choc chips

Don’t you hate looking for a recipe and having to scroll through ads, clickbait and the author’s grandma’s cousin’s babysitter’s life story to get to the recipe? I do, too, and it’s why I posted the ingredients first. Sure, there’s no context yet, but after reading through this once and seeing how the sausage is made (or bread, for that matter…) you can easily get to what you’re after and not have to scroll every time.

Second part of recipe context…I like banana bread (and what else can you do with bananas past their peak that anyone actually wants to eat…I’m looking at you, flourless two-ingredient pancakes: ew!). I do not, however, like what most people try to pass off as banana bread in the form of banana bricks: dense, moist bricks that are difficult to eat and you can’t build anything constructive out of (see what I did there?). So I adapted this recipe to use my pasture-raised duck eggs and be a nice pastry without being a brick. You don’t need to be haute cuisine trained, either, just have a few tricks up your sleeve I’ll demonstrate below. Preheat your baking device to 350 F or 175 C and peel your bananas (make sure to compost the peels and eggshells - they are great for that!):

Add in the sugar - plain white sugar or even better if you have vanilla bean sugar* and machine mix with the beaters. The sugar crystals help “cut” the banana while mixing in to really pureé it well:

Now, add in your room temperature duck egg-yes, this is important. Cold eggs are easier to separate, but we’re not separating the egg here and the room temperature egg will get fluffier when beaten. In this house, anyone who uses eggs in their recipes must check to see if they are fertilized because of my ongoing hatching projects:

In the words of Devo, Whip it Good! Start on low speed but bump it up and mix for several minutes. You want a very creamy almost froth mix (no bricks allowed!):

Before we get to adding the next bit of ingredients, let’s get the chocolate chips ready. The secret to making breads with things (muffins with berries, chocolate or other kinds of chips) without them being completely obliterated inside or sinking to the bottom is by coating them with flour before adding them to the batter. So in a medium sized bowl, add your choc chips and and a half cup of fine flour - cake or bread flour and stir to coat. This bit of finer flour also contributes to a fluffier final bread (not another brick in the wall).

Now to the bananas add everything else except the chips, the order doesn’t matter and you can add it all and then mix without spacing it out: AP flour, butter, baking soda, flavoring and salt. Mix that well, but no need to spend minutes. Now put your mixer away and get a wide spatula. Add the floury chips to the batter and gently mix in with a folding motion, but don’t overmix:

Scrape the batter into a well greased baking dish (this recipe makes a pie size round bread or a square 8x10).

Bake for 50 minutes approximately, until the crust is golden and just starting to split:

If you succeeded, you should have a nice bread with choc chips interspersed evenly throughout. No brick with the chocolate obliterated or sitting on the bottom!

Happy snacking!

Footnotes:

*Vanilla bean sugar: order a handful of vanilla bean pods, slice them longwise. Scrape the bean paste from the inside of the pods into a food processor with plain white sugar and pulse well. Store in a glass jar with the empty pods standing up inside for extra flavor. You can also make your own vanilla flavoring this way, by adding the vanilla paste to an alcohol base (vodka is the usual, but I prefer a bourbon, which adds more flavors and depth). Add the scraped pods to the bottle as well, the flavoring will get stronger the longer it sits.

I’ve gone into a lot of depth about the background of turkeys before, but will sum up a little and talk about etymologies (again). Meleagris (Greek for guineafowl) and gallopavo (Spanish for rooster-turkey) as a species name demonstrates people struggled to name these Guinea-Fowl-Rooster-Turkey things. The ancient Mexicans did, as well, but were more direct - their word Huehxolotl means “big monster” and gives us the modern Mexican word for living turkeys, Guajolote. Not coincidentally, the term for cooked turkey is Pavo. Our English word for Turkeys comes from the misconception that these birds were guineas, from that area of the world, instead of their true origin, Mesoamerica. Its blandish meat pairs well with another Mesoamerican staple, hot chilies. Three basic Turkey varieties or color patterns - White, Black and Bronze, trace their roots to ancient Mexicans and provide the genetic components for more modern color patterns like Narragansett and Royal Palm.

The Latin species name for geese, Anser anser literally means “goose goose” and refers to a basic wild type goose, the Greylag, from which modern breeds have been developed. My favorite breed, the American Pilgrim goose, is similar to the Cotton Patch goose in that these breeds are American and auto-sexing. Thankfully not too closely related to Canadian Geese, which golfers, hikers and the general public have been trained to fear since forever, Branta spp. “black goose”. Perhaps the silly child’s game should be renamed to “Goose, Goose, DUCK” with the corresponding slap that makes you It?

Ducks have wonderfully complex species names, from the Muscovy Cairina moschata (sounds like a fancy wine! and also an American bird) to the Mallard based Anas platyrhynchos from which our domestic ducks come from. Anas is Latin for duck, but weirdly different from the modern Spanish term Pato, which you’re familiar with if you’ve ever watched Pocoyo. The modern Italian word for duck, however, is anatra. The platyrhynchos part is Greek and means “broad-billed” and yes, I know what you’re thinking…the Duck-billed Platypus’ species name is actually Ornitho(bird)rhynchus(snout) anatinus(duck-like). So apparently struggling to name things in Greek and Latin is part of the biologist’s curse.

A lovely duck variety is the Ancona, which is American despite being named for an Italian town (the same town Ancona chickens come from, but are Italian). The chicken breed was developed from Leghorn chickens, which despite their name also are Italian, from Livorno. Americans had trouble pronouncing Italian for “from Livorno” or Livornese and anglicized that term into ‘Leghorn’. Until next time, That’s All Folks!

Inevitably, while attempting to rehome some birds, I get the question, “But are they pure?” and rather than launch into my usual long-winded tirade about the difference between breeds, varieties, breed standards and genetics, I figured I would hack it out on the keyboard and refer these people to this post (but probably not). There is a concept of “breed” that people have in their mind about animals that is tied up with and confused with breed standards, registries and ‘papers’. A breed standard is an agreed upon set of characteristics that defines what an organization considers to be a good specimen of something, among them (but not limited to) coat/feather color. Specimens that fit most of these characteristics can be registered with this organization (‘papered’) and shown, bred, etc. in relation to this organization. This concept works well for example, for dogs and horses where for decades or maybe more, registered animals (‘purebred’) are mated and their offspring produce more registered animals that hopefully also adhere to the standards. From personal experience, my registered Tennessee Walking Horse mare, Kimber, was bred to a registered TWH stallion and her foal was then dna tested to match their dna in order to be registered himself. The dna requirement for TWHs is relatively recent, since 2007 and requires a dna bank and database maintained by the registry organization, the TWHBEA. Before that, the person filing the paperwork was on a scout’s honor to make sure the registered animal on paper and in reality was one and the same. With dogs, even though I own a ‘purebred’ Standard Poodle, I have never been interested in breeding or papers, but I imagine it’s a similar type process, especially with the increasing ease of dna collection, banking and database capabilities.

Someone could show up from another country with a registered animal or from Mars, for example, and attempt to get their animal qualified for an organization here. For an other-papered animal, it would involve subjecting the animal to scrutiny, shows and tests to see how closely it resembles the standard. For the Martian, however, this would be near impossible since the assumption of breed standards is that once a registry has been created, only the offspring from this closed group of animals will be ‘purebred’ and close to the standard. Martian might have a wonderful specimen, but Earthlings will be extremely reluctant to accept that it didn’t come from their registry’s lines and therefore couldn’t fit the breed standard. The Martian then goes and renames his dog a Martydoodle and has an immediate following wanting glowing, floofy dogs:

On the subject of doodle dogs, they are my preferred example of an F1 hybrid. This “first line” generation is a cross between a poodle and something else and has the typical -doodle look (color, fluffy coat associated with Poodle breed standards). This offspring can be bred back to a parent, known as “line-breeding”, breeding back up the line. It can also be bred to other F1s, but the resulting offspring will not necessarily look like the parents, and in the case of doodles, will probably look far off enough to be considered an ugly mutt. A lot of people have bought a pair of fluffydoodles and bred them and omg-what the heck happened? without realizing the genes at play or being committed enough to research and work towards a goal while understanding the implications. Not that I am against hybridizing at all - in fact, I am likely more pro- than anti- hybrids in several applications. Hybrids can create something new with (hopefully) a set of useful characteristics, increase health and diversity and even prevent extinction. Useful hybrids have been created that have sterile offspring but serve a purpose - most famous are mules (donkey dad, horse mom) and hinnies (horse dad, donkey mom), although the preference for mules is overwhelming because of the useful characteristics they bring over hinnies. This is also a case for duck hybrids, Muscovy ducks crossed with Mallard-based ducks are called Moulard or Hinny ducks and are used for table birds (body weight of the Muscovy but added fat and flavor from the mallard). Their offspring are sterile, even though the females can lay eggs that won’t develop. Muscovies come in a nice variety of colors, but are excluded from my own color project because of the sterile offspring issue. My Mallard-based selections are also limited to what I have for certain reasons, which I’ll detail in the duck section below. For now, let’s start with the lowest-hanging fruit,

Pilgrim geese

I chose these geese to guard my ducks and other flock members, because of their medium size, diet of mainly grasses, but most of all their auto-sexing. This means that at hatch, you can tell by color if the goslings are male or female. This ability is incredibly useful for the flock manager and 100% accurate. The Cotton Patch goose is the only other American auto sexing goose and comes in similar color patterns. Both of these breeds have a fascinating history that forms part of the fabric of American history and are disappearing from American farms (links below if you’re interested).

Obviously, the Pilgrims make it easy for me so there’s not a lot of detail about that here. If I were to expand beyond the pair I currently have, I would either line breed daughters back to my gander, or find a reputable and real Pilgrim breeder to get females from. I love my gander, Lorenzo, but one gander with his shenanigans is enough for our homestead, especially during the spring! Some “Pilgrim” geese are not actually Pilgrims and therefore are not reliable to auto sex, buyer beware.

The geese were my latest flock addition when I kept losing ducklings inside my barn at night. I discovered (and dealt with) the snake that was causing the losses and built a hardware mesh box that my babies sleep in until they’re too big for snakes to be interested in. I also have a minnow trap baited with a fresh egg (if a duck egg gets too dirty, this is where it goes)-snake gets inside, eats the egg, then can’t get out. I will say that during the day, the geese make excellent alarm systems for anything they think isn’t right or shouldn’t be there…which isn’t always foreign. During the spring, my gander is protective of his goose, their nest and the barn in general. He chases other birds, my family members and even charges my gelding. Occasionally I have the need to have a staff meeting with Lorenzo, which involves grasping him by his neck and swinging him under my left arm, Heisman trophy style. This allows me to have discussions with him about his behavior, poor choices and future prospects. The geese are quite intelligent and a beautiful addition to any farm landscape, I never regret having added them to my flock, and always finish the staff meetings with kisses on top of his head.

Heritage Turkeys

I won’t go (again) into all of the deets about the turkeys in this post, only to specify that I have heritage turkeys in several varieties. Heritage breeds/varieties are not wild (Eastern, Rio Grande) but are not Broad-Breasted types created and grown for factory level production. Hatcheries and feed stores will often have BB poults for sale, but I think they should come with a warning label as they have notoriously short and laborious lifespans. For all of these, the ‘breed’ is Turkey and the variety can be described by their colors. My project involves a select few of these color varieties, especially when it comes to sex linked poults by color.

A RP tom on a Narr hen should only produce Narr poults, which told me there were other genes at play here. I bought Bill as a “tom that was a Blue/Bronze mix”. Obviously, a few months later I realized she was not a tom and got Al. Also, ‘mix’ is not an accurate term and didn’t help my genetic predictions. With a lot of tweaking the calculator as well as back-tracking what Bill really is, based on having yellow (RP) poults along with speckled (Narr), I figured genetically she is a Black-Winged Narragansett Semi-Color Semi-Gray (say that fast a couple times and you’re talking turkey!). Her daughter with Al, Bob, is the same genetically and fits the calculator results. She is on the right of this picture with two of her full brothers from the summer hatch, she hatched in April 2023:

This year, Bob has been more successful at laying, brooding and hatching than Bill. She hatched out three ducklings in January and a week ago hatched out two poults and a duckling herself and adopted Nugget, an incubator hatched poult days older:

Based on my preference for their colors and the sex-linked poults that would come from them with Al, I added two hens to my flock in late 2023:

RP tom x Sw hen = sex linked Sw males, RP females.

RP tom x LavSw hen = BlueSw males, Blue Palm females.

Ann has had some health issues (lice, wonky feet, unthrifty) and is allegedly three years old+, so I didn’t get any eggs from her for a long time and gave up on that until I found a unique egg amongst my Narr’s and ducks’ [one day I’ll write a strange post about how I can tell almost all of my hen’s eggs apart and how eggshell color is linked to the hen color…stay tuned]. This egg developed and hatched a yellow poult that dna tested as female:

I since found two more of Ann’s eggs and am incubating them despite having cleaned and put away my incubator until September. They are in with predominantly Buff duck and some Cayuga duck eggs, fingers crossed they’ll develop and hatch into something I can study.

Fergus’ eggs hatched a few poults for me in the spring 2024, along with some of Bill/Bob’s. At the time, I still had Moscú, one of Bob’s Narr brothers, and when the poults came along as a mix of speckled and yellow, I suspect he was the tom, as one of her speckled poults dna tested as male:

BWNScSg tom x Sw hen = sex linked Sw and Cornish Palm males, RP and BWNScSg females

Unfortunately, I lost him in the same manner as Tetouan, so wasn’t able to see him develop. Fergus hasn’t begun laying again, but her eggs are easily distinguishable and she loves to lay them in a flowerbed right by the porch, so when it happens again, I’m ready. Her other eggs that hatched dna tested as a male (Sw) and a female (RP). I kept the Sw for my project, Sir Alex Ferguson and a RP female from AlxBill, Maggie Thatcher. I rehomed as a pair an RP tom (AlxBill) and a RP female (MoscúxFergus). This way I could continue my color project without breeding full siblings to eachother. One of the last comparison pictures I took before rehoming was this one below, in which I had some questions specifically about the RP female’s coloring, which appeared to show some gold hints despite being RP. I have not received any answers yet from my turkey color genetics group.

Fergus doesn’t look like a Calico to me, but if that were the case, the possibilities would be:

RP tom x Cal hen = RP, Cal (not sex linked)

BWNScSg x Cal hen = BWNScSg, Cal, Golden Phoenix, RP (not SL)

The only way the top combo is possible is if Sir Alex and Sonora were Calicoes. I think the color difference is too great for that, despite sex differences. So, the bottom more likely combo [Moscú and Fergus were bffs while he was here] would mean that Alex is a Cal or Golden Phoenix, and Sonora perhaps a Cal as well. Same problem as above, except if Alex were a GP and Sonora a Calico. The issue there is, GPs have a very dark base color that Alex does not. So I think the calculator was correct, as was I in identifying the parent colors, but there might be some genes at play that haven’t been fully understood yet or would have to be described in further detail, such as a “dilute Sweetgrass” or something like that.

The thing I overlooked in my zealousness to get sex linked poults was that RPs and Sweetgrass are both yellow when they hatch…uggh. My bad, but they are adorable little things and I enjoy seeing them develop their colors. I also dna test only the turkeys to short change a months-long and possibly wrong process at determining what sex they are (see: my ‘tom’ Bill). My color project involves Palms and Sweetgrasses, but I keep my Narr girls around because they are tough and hardy and really great moms. Bob even got bitten by a snake (copperhead?) on her face while sitting on her eggs in the woods - she was very swollen but also angry at me for moving her eggs and locking her in the barn. She was back to herself in two days - true grit!

Ducks! Yay!

If you’ve made it this far, that’s great, but this part will be really long. I started my ducking journey with Cayugas and am thoroughly pleased with them. But then I started discovering there were other colors! of Cayugas: Blue, Chocolate, etc. and you could sex link ducklings that hatched colors based on what sex they were. A similar color calculator was available for ducks, but with less detail than what has been done on turkeys.

Here’s where the inevitable but, are they pure?? question comes up. The American Poultry Association/APA (the organization) defines Cayugas under waterfowl as a ‘medium duck’ and only as Black (breed standards). Under that definition, other Cayuga colors couldn’t exist either as a breed or a variety because of the Extended black gene. We’ll come back to this.

The APA defines Buff ducks as ‘medium’ as well, but “Only One Variety” as color - what does that mean? Apparently, when you breed Buff ducks they hatch in three different varieties because of the color genes involved. These names are different depending on the organization, but range from Light/Blond to Standard/Buff to Dark/Brown. The color differences are more noticeable in drakes than in ducks. The creator of these ducks also had other colors like Blue and Black, though the Buff coloring was the most popular by far. It is thought that Cayugas and other types of ducks were used to create and define the Buff coloring. That fact and the color variations easily explain how and why other colors are available, especially once you study the specific genes involved.

According to the color calculator, you can get sex linked ducklings at hatch by breeding a Buff drake to a Black duck, which gives Blue males and Lilac females. I found a trio of Buff ducks to add to my flock (one Blond duck, a Blond drake and a Standard drake). These ducks were very similar in body type to my Cayugas, although lighter since they are dual purpose and Cayugas were the premier meat ducks before the popularity surge of the Pekin. I limited myself to medium duck types either to eliminate body types I didn’t want (Call, Pekin, Ancona*, Runner) or color genes I didn’t want to add (Welsh Harlequin, Rouen, Campbell, Magpie).

Light Buff drake x Black duck = Blue males, Lilac females (the calculator calls this color Lilac, but I think visually it looks more like Lavender. There is an incredible lack of pictures and details surrounding these colors of adults and ducklings, so I tried to document my experience as much as possible).

Standard Buff x Black = Blue males, Lilac females, Black males or Chocolate females (so same as above, but more options and sex linked).

It wasn’t likely, but drakes are pretty opportunistic, so just in case I calculated what would happen if Getafe found Paella (which did happen! Pics below):

Black drake x Light Buff duck = Blues (not sex linked, but straight run).

The third component to my duck color project was to add a Crest. The APA recognizes White and Black Cresteds as medium ducks, but I have not been able to locate Black Cresteds anywhere. Buying WCs from a hatchery required minimums and shipping, etc. so I carefully stalked my local feed stores when they would get in shipments of ducklings from their hatcheries. The stores receive ‘assorted’ ducklings which can be a mix of any ducklings the hatchery produces. It was a simple manner to call and ask if any “poofy-headed ducklings” had arrived with the shipment as the clerk could simply look and see. I did this for months until I got lucky. A crest is a sometimes naturally occurring mutation that happens in Mallard-based breeds, never in Muscovies. WC ducks are thought to have descended from crested Runner ducks [called Bali ducks] that were taken back to Europe and bred with white Pekin type ducks. The crest is a patch of feathers that grows from a hole in the skull of the duck**. Some people believe the presence of the crest and breeding for it is unethical, yet these ducks have been around a long time and are present in paintings from the 1700s. A book was published that stated the crest was a lethal gene and ‘killed ducklings in the shell’, however my preferred hatchery has stated that isn’t the case [and besides, if that were true, hatcheries would not make any money off so many ducklings deaths and wouldn’t continue to hatch them]. There are also rumors that these ducks have neurological problems and live miserable lives, but I cannot find actual statistics to back this up. Most people that are fortunate to own Cresteds adore them and I have to say that as they’ve grown, among my ducks they are the most eye-catching, noisy and entertaining ducks. A friend working on our house would refer to them as ‘Einstein ducks’, they are friendly and silly, and there is nothing they love more than getting sprayed with the hose!

So, on to the details of my color project: for the ducks I have a two-branch project. One branch is to develop a flock of Crested Blue mallards and Crested Apricot mallards [these colors are documented in Call ducks, not really in the medium duck, but that’s what I have to go on]. A flock of these colors would ‘breed true’ in that they would produce only BMs and AMs. Alongside color, these ducks would also have to function in a homestead setting: free range for plants and bugs, not fly away and be predator-wary. These characteristics are dependent on husbandry and setting, but it’s important to me to state that color alone will not be the basis for breeding lines. Ducks that seem weaker, health/leg or weight issues, flighty or aggressive personalities despite their color will not be selected.

The second branch is to develop? reinvigorate? redevelop? a solid Black Crested medium weight duck. I have a couple routes to get there, but it requires careful distillation of these three base gene sets and time to allow for breeding cycles. Ducks reach sexual maturity at about five months, but I likely will wait an extra month to incubate eggs to allow the ducks time to get it right.

The first important cross will be

Standard Buff drake x WC duck = Blue Mallard(c) and Mallard(c) males, Lilac Mallard(c) and Chocolate Mallard(c) females. The (c) denotes crested genes, even without visible crest.

The BM and M males from here can be bred to Buff females to produce BM, AM and Mallard straight runs. I’m currently incubating a lot of Buff eggs and will select females to keep in the project. There’s always the chance of Blue SRs and more Blue/Lilac SL from the handful of Cayuga eggs I added to the incubator. Knowing which duck laid the eggs and careful identification [of both egg and duckling after hatch] combined with excellent record-keeping have allowed me to be almost obsessive about documenting my experience.

The females from here form the second branch:

Black drake x LM(c) duck = Blue Bib(c), Black Bib(c), Blue(c), Black(c)

The Bib gene is not one I would like to include in my project, however, these are basically Swedish ducks but with a Crest and still great homesteading ducks. I don’t think I’ll have trouble rehoming these ducks between their beauty and usefulness.

Here’s where my SR Blue drake, Inter, comes into play (and how I justified keeping him in my project, not like I needed to]:

Blue drake x CM(c) duck = Blue(c), Black(c)

Not that my ducks get fed bread ever, but maybe in the next year, I will post about my purebread Martian Black Crested duck:

Resources:

Labradoodle creator regrets it

Cotton Patch geese

Pilgrim geese

The turkey color calculator

Good descriptions of turkey colors: Porter’s and this list with genotypes for the calculator

Mallard-based duck color genetics [long but very informative]

The duck color calculator. If there isn’t a preset menu option, create the color you want with the correct parents and select “Continue with this _”

Cayuga colors info by the same author, in an article and his website [for info only, no ordering is available]

APA waterfowl info

Buff Orpington duck history and color info

*Ancona ducks are not recognized by the APA at all, even though they are an established ‘breed’ with many color combos possible. A friend of mine with an egg production business prefers Anconas and can tell his large flock apart just from the individual color patterns. Here’s an interesting take on the APA Ancona issue.

**Of the four ducklings I purchased, only one seemed to have issues. At first I thought it was blindness and maybe deafness, but it had adapted well to rely on its duckling siblings for safety and getting to food and water. It would swim and act just like the others except sometimes it got left behind and would call loudly for them. Unfortunately it developed a tremor which would cause it to curl its neck under. I tried stretching and massaging the neck muscles to loosen them, but was concerned about quality of life combined with the lack of sight and being able to free range with the others safely. I ended up having to cull this one, but carefully dissected and studied the crest and the hole in the skull. The hole was there and considerably sized, but I think the issue was being caused and worsening by some of the brain tissue growing outside and around the edges of the hole, possibly getting squeezed in the process as the duck grew. I am not sure if this hole is completely present throughout the duck’s life, or in that size, or is a defect that occurs before hatch and heals/closes/gets smaller with age. I have not found research or photos that address this issue, so will commit to doing my own as much as possible out of respect for the ducks.

I do pretty good with animals, but plants and me are frenemies. I have a difficult time getting anything to sprout, grow and produce despite having taken gardening classes, the space to grow stuff, sprinklers and an endless supply of manure (see my attempt at creating compost because of this here). So I wanted to create an easy read guide about some things I’ve learned about seeds specifically. Seeds are to plants what eggs are to my flock: nutrition, genetics, potential and future.

Should I save my own seeds from stuff I eat? I jumped here because I’ll assume you’re reading this as someone in a similar position to me (space, sprinklers, etc. maybe without endless manure if you’re lucky!) already. I have been attempting to save seeds and cuttings from things I chop up in my kitchen for a long time, but usually unsuccessfully. Cuttings from things like celery and lettuce that sit in water and grow are doable, but the end product is not usually like what you brought home from the store. Those giant celery stalks end up producing small leaves that taste great if you like powerful celery flavor, but disappointing in the stalk department. Same for lettuce: you will get nice tiny leaves that are like spring mix, but a big effort for tiny outcome.

You will also need to account for the differences in home grown produce and what you buy in the store, even if it’s marked as “organic”. The produce in your grocery store has been grown with intense production practices that don’t translate to a home garden or even to future produce at all. More on that later…

Now, there is never any harm in trying, especially if there is learning and experience garnered from these attempts. Very top level of saving seeds is to consider “wet” vs. “dry” seeds. Dry seeds come from peppers: bell, green, spicy, you name it. These are easy to harvest and prep: scrape them out and let them dry for days on a paper towel before storage. To get these seeds to germinate later, they must go through a cycle of wet-dry-wet, usually from being planted and watered in warmth to germinate. These are good seeds to start indoors and move outside when they’re inches tall and on their way. Wet seeds come from tomatoes, squashes, cucumbers, melons. They are usually surrounded inside the fruit by some kind of goo or strings. These types of seeds are coated in something to prevent them from germinating while inside the fruit (although I’ve successfully? unsuccessfully? kept a tomato long enough on the counter that little sprouts had started inside the fruit once I cut it. This is good! Plant those things right away in soil and they’ll grow). The reason why I wasn’t able to grow any plants from tomato seeds I’d carefully saved and dried was because of this coating I knew nothing about. The proper way to save these seeds is this: scrape the seeds out along with the goo/strings into a glass jar with some water to cover it. Let it sit on the counter for 3-5 days, stirring it occasionally to prevent mold from growing on the top. This process “ferments” the liquid which removes the anti-germination covering from the seeds. Strain the entire liquid while rinsing to remove all the goo, etc. leaving only the seeds to dry on a paper towel for a few days before storage or planting.

That’s high level because then I get the what about? questions about strange and complicated things like citrus seeds (hard to sprout, take a long time to grow significantly), avocadoes (fun to sprout, but the long wait to fruit is always disappointing), potatoes (those are eyes, not seeds!), etc. Let’s stick with the basics. I probably won’t delve into flower seeds, either, since it seems those types of plants involve seeds (duh!) or some form like cuttings, pups, runners, etc. that is straightforward.

Where do I get my seeds from? My top three seed sources in ascending order:

Store bought. Gets ya every time you go into the feed store/dollar store/garden store. Pros: cheap, easy to find, usually perform well. Cons: use them immediately, their “packed for” date is already old by the time you buy it in the store. A big con for these seeds is that they usually grow well and produce fruit once, but the saved seeds either don’t grow at all or have a super low crop the next time around.

Heirloom/Open pollinated/nonGMO. These are usually catalogs of very interesting seeds that are tested and true by the business selling them. Pros: heirloom and rare types, reliable to continue future harvests, conservancy, specialty and historic types, tested by pro gardeners. Cons: initial price. These seeds have all of the bells and whistles for the planet, your garden and your diet. Favorites from these guys are Rainbow carrots (don’t limit yourself to just orange), purple and black tomatoes, small tangy cucumbers, and things I’d never eaten before that were a joy to grow and taste, like purple kohlrabi. I didn’t get to taste too much of it because my geese absolutely LOVED it and would make a beeline for it if I left the garden gate open.

Seed swaps. Same as above, but as a swap that eliminates the price con and you get the added pros of locally available plants that are from your area or do well in it as well as the knowledge your source can give you as growing tips. This method is also great for getting plants, cuttings, etc. to skip the seed stage entirely, although, of course, save your seeds from these plants!

Not a method per se, but definitely something you can and should cultivate, is collecting your own seeds. Have a friend with an amazing garden? Offer to weed for them while they share their success stories. Someone gave you a lovely cut flower bouquet? Save those seeds from sunflowers, zinnias, basil, oregano and mint! On a hike and see something interesting? Save those seeds! Pocket the fruits/flowers to dry and collect seeds from (daisies, coneflowers, bulbs) or take some cuttings (rosemary, succulents, vines). Get a really good plant id app (my favorite is iNaturalist since it contributes to ongoing preservation and research at different levels) and use it to refine your ability to id plants and know what they’re useful for or avoid them (poison ivy? creeper? sorrelvine?).

How do I store seeds? The most important thing to consider before storing your seeds is that they be completely dry. Always err on the side of letting them dry more than you think is needed, because if they aren’t dry or have pieces of fruit still stuck, it will mold and destroy your harvest. Store them in an area that mimics the seasons outside but without extremes (cellar, garage). Some seeds need to experience the cold or even freeze a bit before they’ll germinate. The sciencey term for this is cold stratification. Apple seeds need this and are persnickety, I tried to emulate cold stratification using humidity and my fridge, but it didn’t work. Fruit trees take such a long time to get mature enough to produce fruit, it’s easiest to shortchange that process by buying trees that are already years old.

Thick hulled seeds (sunflowers, morning glories) do fine dried and stored in a bag. The rest I like to store loose or in a coffee filter inside a jar. If the jar has a top, don’t seal it tightly to let some air flow and prevent mold just in case.

Soaking and sprouting. These methods have really helped me improve at starting plants. The thicker the hull, the more it benefits from a soak: at least overnight if not more, and start with warm water. Some seeds even benefit from being scored or nicked through the hull after the soak (yucca grass seeds). I was able to get millet plants by keeping the seeds moist for a few days until they sprouted, then planted the sprouts. I was trying to “grow my own birdseed”, which is doable, but you must double check the source of your starter seeds - birdseed has been heat treated to prevent the seeds from germinating on store shelves and therefore is impossible to grow. When in doubt as to sprout, you can always soak a few seeds from your supply and see what happens compared to dry planting.

Let it go to seed. If you are able, this method is really great for your garden! I’m an incredibly impatient person (especially with plants), but the payout on letting some plants go to seed benefits your garden and pollinators (the birds and the bees, but the actual ones not the euphemism). Any time someone warns me about this “plant will go crazy/take over” I take advantage, because those kinds of plants are the ones that have a chance at surviving me! These are also good candidates for letting it go to seed, at least some of it: mint and co., marigolds, beans, peas, even carrots if you can keep critters from eating the seeds. The plants from these seeds are a safeguard against losing your stored seeds, they can be “dummy” plants for insects/birds to be drawn to instead of your real effort plants, and can naturally become more disease resistant and adapted to your garden.

Happy harvesting!

Comment below with your favorite (or least favorite!) plant-based saying. Mine is: Bloom where you’re planted. Least favorite because I’ve been “stuck” in places in my life where I wasn’t blooming and wasn’t happy about it, either. Now I can empathize with my own plant attempts that didn’t even grow, or bloom, and am ok enough now to say, This wasn’t the place for you.

Instead of admonishing people to stick it out in places where they aren’t happy or able to bloom, I like Grow as You Go instead. May you find new places and be able to grow continuously!

She hatched April 8th, 2023. She was the first one to hatch from that clutch and, consistent with our theme for naming our turkeys, we named her Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (first one to show). Obviously, at that point we didn’t know she was a she, but the name stuck. Fitting for her turkey family at the time: Dad Al, Mom Bill and Aunt Hilary (have you figured our theme out yet?)

She was joined a day later by Marj, who unfortunately was eaten by a snake (also fitting? You decide).

So Bob’s idyllic childhood “poulthood” was being raised by two doting and protective mothers. This lasted until Bill laid her second clutch of the year and was busy sitting and then raising her five siblings. It wasn’t planned for us to keep these turkeys, so our Hatch Batch theme for these was “Money Heist” and were named Río, Nairobi, Moscú, Tokyo and Denver. Bob was relegated to hanging out with our growing waterfowl flock of Cayuga ducks and Pilgrim geese. At first, the larger duck- and goslings bullied her away from food and water, but eventually she grew into herself and realized she could bully them instead!

When Bob began laying eggs at six months old, the ducks had already been laying for a few months and in a nice straw bale nest designed to keep the ducks laying in one place. I was allowing the eggs to collect instead of bringing them inside every day to see if one of my ducks would go broody and attempt to sit the eggs. Bob would also sneak in every other day or so and lay her own eggs in that nice nest.

When I was getting close to twenty mixed eggs, Bob decided she was going to sit the eggs and began by staying on the nest several hours every day. At night she flew up to the roost with the rest of the turkeys, but my duck Rayo would claim the nest overnight. After about three days like this, Bob refused to come off the nest during the day or night and spent the nights locked in the duck stall, sitting the eggs. None of the waterfowl would bother her, even though I had a suspicion that the ducks would climb over her to lay eggs or lay eggs near her that she would reach out and roll under herself. I monitored the nest as much as possible without disturbing Bob (when she occasionally got up to eat and stretch her legs, I would count and remove eggs if necessary).

After two weeks, I candled the eggs at night (better visibility and less of a disturbance to Bob) and removed any that weren’t developing. The sheer number of eggs needed to be reduced to help increase the hatch rate and prevent rotten egg bombs.

When hatching time approached, Bob was on about seven duck eggs - all that developed from the original mixed batch of eggs. She was extremely protective of the nest and eggs, fluffing up her feathers and chortling if anything came close. I had to use a horse whip as a shield to lift her enough to check the eggs without getting pecked and happened to see a little black ball of fluff! This was our first hatchling, the Intrepid (Hatch Batch theme: pirate ships). Over the next few days, only two other eggs were viable and I moved those to my incubator to finish hatching since Bob had soiled the nest and Intrepid needed to start eating.

The Black Pearl hatched three days later and joined its sibling the next morning.

And last, six days after the first hatch, the Queen Anne’s Revenge hatched. I would let the hatchlings spend the night in the incubator and would take them out to join their family the next morning. I did not want to raise the ducklings myself inside and wanted to give Bob the best chance of mothering during this experiment. Every time she would examine the new hatchlings as if wondering how they had magically multiplied, but was incredibly accepting and protective of every one. Like turkeys and waterfowl alike, they had to quickly learn to snuggle under mom for warmth and safety. I had moved Bob and ducklings to their own hardware mesh box outside of the stall but inside the barn for safety and privacy with their own food, water and greens.

The ducklings are now over a month old and Bob only recently (about a week now) decided to sleep at nights on the roost, the ducks go into the box to sleep and I close the door. During the day and free ranging, Bob still watches over the ducks, mostly hanging out with the turkeys. The turkeys are tolerant and accepting of the duckies, whereas the geese chase the duckies until Bob chases them. The duckies bravely chase their real mother, Rayo, knowing that Bob is there as a bodyguard.

There were three concerns for me with a turkey mom raising ducks and this experience has been informative. None of the three concerns end up being a dealbreaker for this experiment, but I believe it’s a credit mostly to Bob’s mothering abilities.

One: Would Bob be able to protect ducklings from predators while tolerating their love for water? Despite warnings not to let ducklings “swim” before proper feathering, I have not been able to keep my days old Cayugas out of their water. This goes for both naturally and artificially raised ducklings. I have learned to adapt to it and adjust their water and food setup accordingly. I start with small dishes inside larger shallow ones to contain the mess, eventually move those outside of their sleeping area and increasing in diameter and depth. At around a month old, the Cayugas can get in and out of the rubber horse bowls with water, but not the kiddie pool I have for the waterfowl with rocks in and around it (yet-they will be able to soon). Bob stays nearby while they swim and play and keeps the waterfowl away from the ducklings, but she is not concerned by their water-loving behaviors.

For predators, turkeys have several warning sounds or calls they use - one for “snake” (persistent high-pitched peeps) and one for “hawk” (a nasal whine if it’s far away and needs observing and an urgent chortle that means take cover immediately). Obviously, Bob using the turkey group to help babysit the ducklings is advantageous because more eyes are on the sky and the babies at the same time. A turkey hen raising poults will use the hawk call and the poults will hide if possible, flattening themselves against the ground and staying perfectly still. Their speckled poult feathers help provide camouflage along with perfect stillness. They don’t run to hide under the hen, in case she needs to jump or run to attack and fend off the predator and only when she gives the signal do they get up and continue their business. In Bob’s case, I only observed her using the hawk call with her ducklings and they responded the way ducks do to predators. So they understood the call, but responded by standing upright as much as possible to see the best and in a clustered group, also perfectly still. It will be interesting in the future to see where this group of ducks decides to spend its time, especially as breeding and egg laying behaviors emerge - with their turkey godfamily or with the waterfowl.

Two: sleeping habits. With my turkey poults, I add low sticks or perches to their stall so they can begin practicing jumping and perching behaviors. They also practice on their own moms, on the ground or even way up on the roost.

Eventually the poults can sleep on the same height roost as the adults with the help of stairs of sorts (a leaning pallet).

Ducks only sleep on the ground or floating on water if it’s available. Some evenings Bob would fly up to the roost and the ducklings would run around below, confused. But after I herded them into their box, Bob would make sure to come into the box as well and I would close the door. Only after the ducklings were about a month old, they would put themselves into the box, Bob would fly up to the roost, and I would close the door. By this point the ducks keep themselves warm at night and Bob will still protect them while ranging during the day.

Three: dust baths. I honestly forgot about this detail while considering the feasibility of turkeys raising ducks. A few afternoons ago, the turkey toms had spent all morning fighting while the hens decided to have a dust bath party under the cedar trees. Either brush pile ashes or the moist decaying needles and dirt under the cedars are their favorite dust bath spots. Group baths are the best, since multiple flapping wings can raise quite a dust cloud and get all of those hard to reach places. The ducklings during this whole process were clustered in a group nearby, but not taking part.

So, would I repeat this experience again? Yes, but credit to Bob’s mothering abilities which I would like for her to apply to raising turkeys or perhaps goslings, instead of ducks. None of my observations were a dealbreaker for her as a mom to ducklings and it kept me from having to brood babies inside. What is helpful is a similar hatch time for turkeys and waterfowl (28+ days), but the broody mom still has to recover physically from sitting and not eating properly during that time. At least in this case, ducklings develop so much faster than turkey poults that Bob has been able to eat and exercise a lot to quickly get back in form.

Bob is not yet a year old and considering her skill at mothering, I’m excited to see what our next hatching experiment will involve!

2025 update: Bob hatched out Buff duck Couscous in July 2024 along with some of her own turkey poults. I only kept Cous to try and see if she could be taught mothering by the Pro and because female Buffs fit nicely into my duck color project. The Black Pearl was a drake and ended up going to a new flock. I kept Intrepid & Revenge for several months, but then they went to a new flock as well.

Bob has not been able to steal any duck nests currently, but has been laying her own eggs in the pasture where she can’t brood. Once she finds or makes a nest inside the barn, I’ll allow her to brood again because she is such a great mom.

1. Start your incubator 3 days before you add eggs to troubleshoot. Temperature should reach 99.5F and stay there consistently. Humidity should be as close to 50% consistently. After you’ve used your incubator several times, you can start it the day before. Some incubators need to be factory reset every time you start a new batch - see the manual. A separate temp/humidity gauge is very useful to make sure you’re hitting targets for both - my preference is a Bluetooth meter that sends the readings to an app on my phone.

2. Make sure your eggs are unwashed, fresh (no more than a week since being laid) and fertile. If they are very dirty, scrape the dirt off gently and only enough to where the egg can “breathe” - do not wash the egg with liquids.

3. Shipped eggs should be padded, not bagged or sealed. Eggs should be stored and shipped with the bigger side up, pointy side down. Open the package immediately to check the eggs, but DO NOT handle the eggs. Allow them to sit pointy side down for 2 hours at least to settle and come to ambient temperature after being shipped. If any are cracked or broken, remove them and as much of the liquid as possible without disturbing the good eggs. Small cracks can be sealed carefully with a same-size covering of melted wax, but these eggs will have less of a chance of developing successfully.

4. One by one, remove each egg, unwrap and inspect it. Mark each egg individually (number/letter) on a side with pencil or very fine marker. You can candle the eggs before putting them in the incubator to check the shells for cracks. Mark, candle, then set the eggs beside the incubator before opening the lid to avoid heat loss until they’re all ready. Set them inside on their sides and inside a turning tray slot, unless you aren’t turning or doing it manually. The marks on the eggs should help you see that they are being turned. Almost every time I start a batch, a few hours after setting the eggs my incubator will beep a low-temp warning. This is simply the warm, empty incubator struggling to fully warm the eggs inside and takes several hours to achieve - this is completely normal and everything’s fine.

5. Once the eggs are inside, keep temp/humidity consistent and lid closed for one week. Candle to check development. Duck eggs take 28+ days to hatch out, so only candle once a week unless you’re in a classroom setting. Always get everything ready before opening the lid to minimize the time the eggs are chilled and heat/humidity loss from the incubator. In a natural setting, mom gets off the eggs for a few minutes a day until they get close to hatching. Developing eggs should have a distinct air sac at the bigger end and veins/embryos. Closer to hatch, the air sac will be about 30% of the egg, the duckling will look very dark and might be moving. Remove any quitters (embryos die and stop developing), rotten eggs (they can have bacteria inside and you don’t want these exploding) or infertile eggs that never develop and throw them away.

6. When hatch time gets close (~day 25), stop turning the eggs, temp remains at 99.5 and humidity should be increased to 65%. During candling you can see shadowing (the duckling presses against the internal membrane), internal pipping (the duckling pokes through the internal membrane and begins breathing from the air sac), and external pipping (the eggshell develops a circular crack and eventually the external membrane will be opened under the crack). Do not handle the egg after external pipping, only candle by putting the light source against the egg in the incubator if needed. Hatching starts with a round break in the eggshell, followed by a tear in the external membrane under that crack, zipping where the eggshell breaks all around into rough halves, and finally the duckling hatches by struggling out of the eggshells. You can hear peeping at this stage and the eggs will rock back and forth as the ducklings move inside. Talk to the eggs at this stage - this is when the duck will communicate with her babies so they recognize her after hatching. Be patient during the phases, as sometimes over a day can go by without apparent progress while the ducklings rest.

7. DO NOT remove ducklings from the incubator after hatching. Allow them to dry (they will look fluffy), stimulate the other ducklings to hatch (they will move around and roll eggs, that’s normal) and keep the heat/humidity even inside the incubator. Hatching eggs will increase the humidity in the incubator, this is normal and can be adjusted by opening all vents to keep it around 60%. Hatchlings absorb nutrients during the hatch phases and can survive for a day without eating or drinking. Only move ducklings to a brooder in groups, so they don’t stress by being alone and can keep warm. If you need to open the incubator for any reason, have help and move fast (one person controls the lid, the other grabs chicks and empty shells). Chicks can bleed from their umbilicus (belly buttons), so they need to be removed and cornstarch applied to stem the bleeding.

8. Incubator deep clean by disassembling, disinfecting, cleaning with a soft cloth and fully air drying before storage or the next round of eggs. Happy hatching!!

Pros of duck ownership:

They are very cute and even as adults, don’t have any real weapons to defend themselves. They are easily handled by children or shy adults (some breeds are more amenable to handling/cuddling than others).

They lay rich, large eggs with a harder shell, for a longer season than chickens.

They forage extremely well and will eat anything and a lot of things chickens won’t like slugs, snails, large beetles, etc.

No pond is necessary for raising ducks. They need a water source deep enough to dunk their heads in and really appreciate water to swim in to clean themselves, mate in and wash away parasites. Most duck owners, myself included, get by with a (easily drained, cleaned and filled) kiddie pool.

They don’t damage flowerbeds or plants. They don’t make dust baths the way other poultry can and don’t have the pecking or serrating ability to decimate plant growth. Because they eat so many bugs, I like to give them monitored access to my garden. If they find water or mud, they will make bill-sized holes in the ground, which for me just helps to aerate and get water deeper into the ground.

They are highly weather-tolerant compared to chickens. In the summer if they have access to swimming water, they cool themselves off well. In the cold, they have layers of downy feathers and body fat that keeps them insulated. I notice they will move around, then lay down to warm up their feet under their feathers before moving on again. Their absolute favorite weather is rain and mud, which humans and other birds alike avoid, but ducks thrive in this.

My Pilgrim geese and Cayuga drake Getafe in their first snow. Getafe demonstrates the laying down position to warm up feet before continuing business as usual.

I’m not at this point yet in my flock management, but duck meat is very dark and fatty. Rendered duck fat is a prime ingredient even in non-duck meat dishes because of its flavor. Their feathers and down can be used for blankets, clothing, lures, decorations. Duck liver (foie gras) is a delicacy that can be achieved and enjoyed without the gavage technique employed by factory farms.

They are relatively low maintenance as far as housing (no roosts needed, weather tolerant, cheap bedding) as long as it’s predator-proof.

You can get day-old ducklings mailed to your nearest post office. Before hatching, ducks absorb nutrients from the egg to enable hatching and recovery without needing to feed for a day or so. This allows reputable hatcheries to ship babies with a heat source and nutrient gel successfully, almost to your house. It’s very convenient and works well from big hatcheries.

Day-old hatchlings arrive as a group in a thick box with a heat source and nutrient gel. Only order from reputable hatcheries that will insure any shipping losses.

I recommend this method for starting your flock, because feed stores selling babies are usually impulse buys by unprepared people that end up dumping domestic animals into the wild. Purchases cannot be returned to the store and usually suffer the same fate as unsold babies (it’s not pretty and is a dirty secret your chain feed store would like to keep quiet).

My Cayugas with two striped Rouen ducklings (feed store rejects that would have been destroyed otherwise).

Another way to procure ducks is through local farms and hobbyists who market using websites. I suggest this only after raising your own ducklings successfully to fully understand what healthy ducks look like and be able to maintain your own flock’s health through quarantine and treatment.

Their manure can be applied directly (bedding included) to plants without aging or composting as it’s mostly water.

They are not as noisy as other birds (relatively). In ducks, the females are actually noisier than the males and QUACK when they’re broody or upset. Males make raspy noises which aren’t loud, but most backyard duck owners will have females anyway.

They can be more disease- and injury-resistant compared to chickens. This makes it better for kids and novice flock managers.

Ducklings grow and develop quickly. It takes them weeks to have the foraging and feathering that takes my turkeys months. In my first go with ducks, I had purchased hatchlings, started a cohesive foraging flock, got eggs and hatched eggs from those ducks before even a year had passed. My ducks started laying at five months and at this time (eight months of age) my drake ensures fertility and I have ducklings hatched - a great return after half a year.

The Intrepid, first generation duckling hatched here at home. Parents are less than a year old.

Cons of duck ownership:

They are MESSY. They skidmark poop constantly and where they eat, swim and sleep. They spill food into their water and water into their food and on the floor and on themselves and get dirt in their water and it goes on and on…

Everything on this planet likes to eat ducks and their eggs (humans, dogs, cats, hawks, critters, snakes, etc). They are predated on heavily, so always purchase extras to account for inevitable losses.

My day-old replacement ducklings and goslings shipped together. I went through three shipments and got geese as flock protectors before my adult flock was established.

28 day+ hatch time, more for Muscovies (chickens are 21 days and other poultry can be similar or longer).

They need supplemental niacin in their diet depending on age, breed and husbandry style. Some feed companies consider this, selling waterfowl feed or include niacin and high protein in an “all-flock” blend. Young ducks, heavy fast-growing breeds (Pekin) and ducks that cannot forage will need supplemental niacin.

They can fly. Different breeds have varying levels of ability, but this is something to be considered carefully since you don’t want your investment literally flying away. Breed ability, fencing height and even wing clipping can help - some. Cayugas are a “low” flying ability breed on paper, but my drake can still clear a 4ft livestock fence with clipped wings when he gets riled up. My girls only run along the ground, flapping.

They can bully other flockmates. My ducks like to tuck their neck in and run at other birds, especially smaller/younger ones and over resources like food and water. Drakes can chase other birds, grab neck feathers and mortally injure those with different equipment (chicken hens). Drakes can also overmate and injure females, even their preferred female among many. Flock management to provide a correct male to female ratio, hiding spaces and eliminating damaging behaviors (freezer camp) is necessary.

They can lay their eggs wherever inspiration strikes. They make their nests on the ground, so nesting boxes are ignored. I have tried letting them out to forage later in the morning, but that doesn’t always work. I have had to hunt for eggs in flowerbeds and completely random places in the barn. What has worked has been to let some eggs accumulate in an approved location - then they will be consistent and keep depositing eggs there.

Duck eggs can also be dirty, depending on where they are laid and how much it was rolled or kicked around before being collected. That said, I store my eggs at room temperature unwashed until I’m ready to cook them. Because of this storage technique and a thicker shell, duck eggs can have a long shelf life. A heavily soiled egg is either put into my snake trap (the smell can actually attract them) or scraped to remove the worst of it.

They can be taught basic tricks (mine jump to eat grapes out of my fingers and run up to me when they see me), but overall intelligence and savviness is not their forte. My turkeys will put themselves in the barn at dusk and right before rain comes, but the waterfowl roams around in the semi-dark looking for me. As flattering as that is, it’s the most unsafe part of the day for them. I can easily catch my ducks if I have a space I can corner them in, since they don’t fly to get away from me and don’t have teeth or claws to fend me off.

Cayuga Ducks

Next, I will explain why I chose this breed to homestead with and how reality has compared with the information I researched before getting my ducks. I have not included the history of Cayugas, as there is the same and conflicting information available anywhere about their history. They are a mallard-based breed (as opposed to Muscovy ducks, which are their own branch genetically and breeding to mallards creates a hybrid moulard or hinny duck). They are from and named after the Cayuga lake region in New York, an American breed currently listed as Watch status by conservancy groups.

As ducklings, they are solid black (sometimes with a yellowish tinge on their head and bib) with black bills and feet. As adults, they are uniformly solid beetle green-black with some very dark blue wing feathers. Males will develop a shimmery greener head and neck, curly tail feathers and a yellowed bill and feet. Females maintain a dull black bill and feet and can begin developing white body feathers with every molt. There is some debate on if their coloring can help protect them from predators since they look like other undesirable birds (ravens, for example), but regardless they are beautifully colored in the sunlight. Cayugas are one of the few breeds that have this distinctive shiny green-black coloring.

Drake Getafe in the front (yellowed bill, green head) and duck Rayo on the right.

Size: A normal sized duck, between 5 and 7 lbs grown. They are the smallest members of my mixed flock (turkeys and geese). When I pick them up, I’m surprised by how little they weigh - mostly feathers and compared to my other birds, but they are extremely manageable. Heavier meat breeds (Pekin) have health issues and require more nutrition, so this size duck was what I wanted.

Eggs: One of the interesting listed things about Cayuga eggs is that females lay marbled-looking eggs that lighten up as the season goes on. My ducks started laying consistent eggs daily at 5-6 months of age. Compared to turkeys, the age was the same, but my starting hens can have egg issues (shell-less, double yolkers, busted from laying on the roost) and lay every other or every few days. Cayuga “dark” eggs are also a possibility, but not a certainty. My older duck began laying at 5 months old and they were all and have been an off white color. My younger girl began at 6 months of age and gave me a marbled egg that faded within three days to its regular color of very light grey*. If I give duck eggs to anyone, I have to stipulate that they are duck eggs and that is their normal color or people think they are weird or rotten. It’s also much harder to crack duck eggs for baking - pro tip: crack all the way around the middle of the egg and slowly insert your thumbs into the membrane, or else you’ll get shell pieces that fall in.

Since I don’t have a pond and my ducks forage all day, their eggs have a rich taste with no hint of fishyness. Overcooking them at all (scrambled, fried, quiche) can make them leathery because the white has a more gel-like consistency than chicken eggs. They have more yolk to white ratio than chicken eggs, with a deep orange yolk. Duck eggs will excel in baked goods and my favorite - cheesecakes - especially if whipped well while mixing the recipe. There are also key differences in using room temperature vs. refrigerated eggs: follow the recipe details or use cold eggs for fluffiness, room temp for density.

Temperament: I neglected to read carefully the temperament rating of Cayugas from my hatchery (third nervous breed) as I was dazzled by the other details. Even though I read that these ducks can be preferred for duck herding trials (yes, it does exist and is really cool to watch, both the dogs and the ducks!), I think it’s more because of their grouping up ability. I would not consider the Cayuga a very cuddly duck, even though they are easy to handle once caught. My ducklings have gotten into their water dish pretty much immediately and enjoy running around as a gang for no apparent reason. It’s entertaining for me, but the rest of the flock tries to get out of the race course, especially as the galloping ducks grow bigger. What I wanted more than pet aptitude or cuddliness was their ability to range and forage and they exceed in that area. They keep a watchful eye on anything in the sky - even far away jetliners - and when napping keep one eye open on the surroundings. I have only lost ducklings inside, at night to snakes. Adulthood and adding a pair of protection geese to my waterfowl flock has meant no losses to daytime predators.

Health: I make sure niacin, protein, grit and calcium supplementation is available on top of quality feed and foraging. Ducklings get the first two from an all flock feed and brewer’s yeast. I stop the yeast after they are foraging regularly (5-6 weeks) because they have access to the feed at least twice a day. Grit is all around them, free choice while foraging and is extremely important for digestion. Ducks will eat almost anything and need the grinding action of dirt and small stones to break down large or fibrous things they have eaten. Calcium is needed by laying ducks for hard eggshells and to prevent their bones from being weakened. I buy oyster shell and leave it near a water source, to help them wash down the chunks they pick up in their bill. Snailshells are also a good source of calcium, I will step on really large ones and the ducks come along and vacuum it up - especially if there is still a snail inside!

When they are ducklings, I will pick pieces of green plants (safe grass, leafy plants and all parts of dandelions especially) and put them in their water. Floating greens mimic a pond environment to teach them to forage for greens and filtering behavior (they use their bill in water or mud to filter out food). Floating treats like oatmeal flakes and mealworms are stimulating to ducklings as well, along with good nutrition and training (human=yum).

Access to water is the most important thing to raising ducks. As ducklings, you can use vitamin water to boost them after hatch or shipping. They also need water near their food to wash it down and into their crop and to prevent impaction or pasty butt. They also need clean water for dunking their whole head to wash out their eyes and nostrils, since there is no other way for ducks to clean them. If it’s very cold outside, I take warm water out for my ducklings to drink and bathe in and can’t help but compare their bubble-making endeavors to kids drinking chocolate milk. There were a lot of warnings against letting ducklings swim (I think because they can get tired and drown and because hatchery ducklings don’t have access to mom’s feather oils to aid in floating and waterproofing). I have never been able to keep my Cayugas out of their water, regardless of hatchery, natural, or incubator hatch - they simply love the water. It’s hard to keep their water fresh, but worth having a swim area that’s easily cleaned and refilled. My Cayuga ducklings enjoy playing submarine under even shallow water, which develops their ability to get clean by bathing and stimulates their own oil-producing gland above the tail. You can observe days-old ducklings in standing water using their head to splash water onto their back and begin grooming with their bill and head.

My Cayugas have been healthy compared to other breeds. For a short period - due to snake losses and waiting on replacement ducks to ship - I bought two feed store ducklings to keep my lone survivor Cayuga company. These guys were probably three or four weeks old based on their feathering and though not labeled as any breed, were Pekins. They had had zero human interaction and were very flighty. I doubt said feed store was interested in or even knew about niacin requirements, so these ducks had very bowed legs and would get tired trying to keep up with my Cayuga. Their entire life up to that point had been inside a trough, so I think lack of exercise also contributed to the bowing. They would try to follow my Cayuga around the race course and while foraging, but would lay down often from tiredness. After a week or so of niacin, exercise and ability to swim, their legs did straighten quite a bit and their stamina matched my Cayuga’s. Once they got old enough to contemplate breeding and to keep my breed pure, I rehomed them with a friend.

My Cayugas have not experienced being eggbound, lameness or sudden death. One of my ducks has the very beginning of Angel Wing, but she would not tolerate bandages or wraps, it only affects her esthetically and has not progressed. No one’s really sure what causes Angel Wing, but it’s possible too much protein can (brewer’s yeast has niacin but also protein, which unwittingly bumped up the amount I was feeding).

I deworm young flockmates preventively and any new introductions to the flock. I use horse paste inserted into hollowed-out grapes to make it as enjoyable as possible. Little ones or adults that don’t understand grape awesomeness get paste put into their beak/bill and their neck rubbed to help them swallow. The horse paste is safe to use and I always overdose a bit to make sure it’s effective. I don’t have wormy flocks or deworm so often to be concerned about resistance and haven’t had symptoms of worms the horse paste doesn’t kill.

I did have some turkey hens I bought come in with lice. That was my fault as I didn’t check the newcomers over well enough and should have. Lice spray was applied to all of the turkeys on their skin and repeated every week to 10 days a couple times. When I change out bedding completely, I add a layer of deodorizing clay and spinosad dust before adding new bedding and that has eliminated the lice issue. I have never seen lice or mites on the waterfowl, mainly because they have daily free access to deep enough water to swim in and drown parasites.

Noise: Cayugas are not quiet ducks. As ducklings, they were kept in my husband’s office inside a brooder trough and peeped constantly. Any stimulation (light, noise, temperature) would get them going again. As adults, my drake makes a raspy wack wack noise, but the ducks can quack loudly and are more consistently making sounds. They will quack softly and continuously while foraging, more insistently if they are interested in something (those hay bales sure are fascinating!), loud if they hear splashy sounds (filling or cleaning the pool) and very loudly if something is wrong. When they are separated from the others or want in or out, you will know it.

Flying ability: Hatchery charts will list Cayugas as low to none flying ability, but this isn’t quite true. The girls run flapping along the ground and can occasionally get about a foot off the ground. My drake on the other hand can fly quite high and for a distance enough to put him in danger. Even after clipping one wing to destabilize him while flying, he adapted and can fly just as well when he gets riled up. This happens regularly when my geese (also supposed to have low/zero flying ability, mind you) get to flapping around the pasture and into the yard several times a day. They do it to get somewhere faster and it’s efficient, so I would consider Cayugas a flight risk under the right circumstances.

Brooding and mothering: My Cayugas have been good at laying consistently and hiding their eggs. I was letting eggs collect to see if one of my girls would decide to sit. My young turkey hen took an interest in the nest and would lay her eggs in there as well. Daily I would check the nest, remove turkey eggs for eating, date the fertile eggs (my drake only likes to mate one of my ducks, so I confirmed only her eggs were fertile) and put them back. I had collected close to twenty eggs when my turkey hen decided she was going to sit the eggs. The first few days before she committed, she would claim the nest during the day and fly to roost with the others at night. Overnight my fertile duck would cover the nest. So what began as a duck-broodiness test ended with a turkey mom to three ducklings. I had to incubate two of the eggs and add them to mom and ducklings later because the timing of their hatch was off by as much as six days.

I will update again as these ducklings grow to track sex and hardiness and update on my ducks as laying season picks up again*. Some things I learned from this experience: fresh duck eggs hatch best (less than a week old), duck embryos are easier to see than turkey eggs when candling and Cayuga duckling behavior is similar regardless of incubator or natural hatch (even if “mom” is not your same species). This was important to prove or disprove the lack of oils from mom affecting ducklings’ ability in the water.

*I had begun marking and leaving eggs in the duck stall to entice them to lay only there. What I thought was the ducks slowing down laying eggs because of the cold was actually them hiding a stash of eggs every day in my flowerbed! So my Cayuga girls have been very consistent with an egg a day since 5 months old and sneaky about hiding them.

When colonizing Europeans returned to North America, they brought with them this hardy staple with domestication under its belt. After having survived Thanksgiving (just kidding - most of the original Thanksgiving fowl was likely ducks or geese, nice and chubby for that time of year before beginning their migration vacation) these turks were allowed to mingle (re-mingle?) with the rangy wild turkeys and helped create some lovely color varieties we have today. All turkeys are turkeys, they don’t have breeds - their unique color schemes are known as varieties.

Today these turks are known as Heritage turkeys, a happy medium between the scrawny wild ones and the horrid factory/industrial Butterballs everyone loves/hates at Thanksgiving. Allow me to pull up my soapbox for a little bit to discuss why no one should ever support or consume the factory turkey industry.

One-your health. Factory raised poultry consists of animals genetically manipulated to hatch, grow and die in a span of weeks (notice I didn’t say “live” because that will be addressed in point three). Birds are slaughtered in an assembly line process uncarefully inspected (if at all) by an employee paid to let as many corpses make it to sale as possible (time is $$). They are injected with saline water (to increase their flavor after cooking and add weight so the consumer pays a higher amount for what they’re actually getting) and washed with acidic solutions intended to kill bacteria resulting from the factory they were raised in and the one they’re processed in. Then, they are *hopefully* packaged and preserved properly from truck to store to shelf to your cart to your home until you decide to cook it. This method of eating, unfortunately, is a continuous assault on your immune system and longterm health. We are lead to believe that meat = protein that’s healthy and safe. The turkey industry is also way less transparent and regulated than even the chicken industry, which is heavily guarded by the big companies that own chicken genetics, eggs, breeds and shipment to factory farms.

Two: the environment. Factory raising poultry, even for just the weeks before slaughter, is a messy, infectious, contaminating process. If we were to tally up the real cost of eating those nuggets or the turkey leg at the fair, it would not be worth it for all of us as a planet, and it’s not worth it personally. Any animal combined in small spaces will spread diseases between themselves and the humans handling them. Using robots to detect and remove deceased birds (because finding humans to do this job is notoriously difficult and soul-sucking) doesn’t help the awful conditions of factory farming. Poultry barns produce a lot of heat and require a lot of energy investment in large fans to prevent mass die-offs. The manure and soiled bedding created daily by the birds is impossible to get rid of, which can lead to stockpiling that leaks gasses into the air and nasty juices into our water. Medications in the feed designed to lower deaths also make their way into the flesh of the birds, their feces and the environment as well (finishing your course of antibiotics to prevent resistance has nothing on the effect factory farming has on creating resistance because of the contents of feed). The inputs of fuel, space for the barns, water for drinking and processing and human labor costs also make factory farming in general and poultry farming in particular not feasible. Why are we still like this today instead of studying this as a historical case we learned from? Meat industries in the interest of “national food and economic safety” are heavily subsidized. They are owned, managed and lobbied for by large agribusiness corporations that care for their bottom line instead of the consumer’s waistline, the health of our planet or these food animal’s lives.

Three - the animals themselves. The variety of food we eat in America (and globally) is rapidly diminishing - most of our diet is limited to 12 crops and 5 types of meat. These 5 animals (chickens by and large, followed by pigs, turkeys, sheep, goats and cows) are mostly industrialized breeds raised in cramped, unsanitary conditions, treated inhumanely and improperly slaughtered without ever living as their species should for even one hour. Turkeys of the Broad Breasted varieties that make up the industrial turkey business cannot breed naturally, raise their poults, fly or even walk well. These turkeys in order to maintain such an immense body and breast weight within a short life span have to be artificially inseminated (yes, someone has THAT job…think about that when you see those rows of Butterballs). Rescued turkeys of these varieties crush eggs they attempt to sit on and have leg and heart issues that usually lead to an early and sudden death.

I have purposely not delved into the dairy or egg industries to keep this post shorter, but these factory farms have their own devilish set of horrors tacked onto the meat industry’s farms. Baby bulls born on a dairy farm are repurposed into veal, a product created by overfeeding an animal caged to limit mobility so it develops fat instead of muscle in a lifespan that never exceeds babyhood. Females are kept but taken away from their own moms and artificially fed back their milk so they can join the production line for a bit - no one escapes the ultimate slaughter fate and are listed on menus as “retired dairy cow” to soften their sad reality. Salmonella on your eggs? Salmonella is present naturally in the environment and not usually a concern for properly handled eggs and meat. Why is it such a food baddie? The medications fed to the animals create resistant super bugs that are inserted into our food supply through the slaughtering and delivery process, right into our kitchens and our mouths. Eggs when laid are coated in a bloom, a natural shield that allows the egg to breathe (exchange gasses with the environment) while keeping a barrier against opportunistic bacteria. This bloom remains on the egg while mom finishes laying a clutch over several days, decides to incubate the eggs, all the way to the day they hatch a month later.

Our turkey hens lay an egg every other day, on the ground, until they have enough to sit on and hatch in ~28 days (one week longer than chickens).

The egg industry does not allow a normal egg laying timeframe in an appropriate nest, so it washes the egg of its bloom which then requires the eggs be refrigerated until they are used. These two examples (dairy and eggs) clearly demonstrate an industrial response not to a problem (is enough food available?), but to a financial incentive (creating a demand for mass produced meat that’s unhealthy, causes suffering and is heavily lobbied/subsidized, but makes money for the company). There would be enough milk from a cow if we used only the extra after feeding her baby and processed it carefully for maximum preservation and usefulness (my personal favorite methods are cheese and butter, since the only thing that needs to be drinking cow’s milk is just a. baby. cow. seriously.). The eggs produced on our homestead (turkey and duck eggs only, goose eggs are too precious to eat compared to getting a live goose) are for eating mostly, with notable exceptions. My two ducks so far have given me an egg each, every day, even in the cold weather. For this reason alone, they beat chickens feathers down (bad pun points for me!). These eggs are collected and stored unwashed at room temp until I’m ready to use them. Since I was starting up, I would label eggs with a date and after washing before adding to my recipes, would check for fertility. We have one male duck (known as a drake) whose sole responsibility on this planet is to make sure we have ducklings. After my turkey Bob hatched some duckies, he remains here because (only because) he fulfilled that purpose. If you’re used to using chicken eggs, duck egg whites have a thicker gel-like consistency, rich yellow yolks and larger size (every recipe benefits from more egg, prove me wrong). My ducks have a kiddie pool to swim in instead of a pond and free range all over the place, so the taste of their eggs is very creamy “eggy” and zero fish taste. It’s hard to get the whites to whip up for merengues and scrambling or frying the eggs makes them leathery, but duck eggs are the best cheesecake makers ever.

Our turkey’s eggs end up being 1.5-2 times the amount of a chicken egg with very similar taste and behavior for cooking. I only recently began eating their eggs (as opposed to letting them collect, sit and hatch) when my young hen began laying at six months old into the colder months. Being a color combination I didn’t want more of and not wanting to care for poults in the dead of winter, I removed her eggs every other day or so when she deposited them in the duck nest. Eventually, she committed to the nest and a month later hatched out duck babies she loves fiercely - see previous paragraph. {For more on Bob’s duck hatching story, check out her section in my posts} Generally, much like goose eggs, turkeys don’t lay enough eggs per year to eat and instead people prefer to hatch them out into poults.

Bob’s first time eggs are different while she gets the hang of it (small lower left, normal in the middle and a big double-yolker on the top).

Eggs are eggcellent nutrition in a not-as-fragile-as-you’d-think package, but once again, consumerism and industry cancel out common sense in the interest of turning a profit. Chickens in battery cages live a miserable existence until slaughter time. “Cage-free” eggs aren’t any better, since without cages, more chickens can be stockpiled in one place (no grass, sunshine or freedom), intended to pump out eggs until slaughter time. These labels and nicknames given to our food are researched and marketed to assuage guilt over what kinds of horrors happen to factory farmed animals so you keep purchasing them.

Factory farming must also make consumers forget or unaware of the “modifications” done to livestock in order to stockpile them. Poultry has beaks and combs burned off when they’re just hatched, or if they’re male, get tossed alive into a grinder. Pigs have tails cut off and mama pigs are forced into special crates that prevent them from lying down on their piglets because of the lack of space. Dehorning, fang removal and castration are all done without anesthesia or even skill in most cases.

These three reasons are actually the top arguments for a plant-based diet, although in inverse order. Used to be, vegetarians were barefoot hippies that didn’t eat meat for ethical reasons, but nowadays the main concern is personal health as a result of diet followed more closely by concerns for the environment. Animal rights have fallen behind as a concern that would lead to changes in diet and choice, because of the resilient lobbying and marketing by agribusiness to make us forget or not know where meat comes from. Slaughter byproducts are also a big business, which it would need to be as it’s such a large problem to deal with. Bloodmeal, bonemeal and feathermeal are sold as fertilizer and ingredients in other foods, pet foods or fed back to livestock. There are serious cross-contamination issues with this approach, as no livestock in nature would consume that much of its own species’ flesh and despite being processed, can pass dangerous bacteria, viruses and prions* back into the food supply. Hides are turned into leather products or treated with chemicals to make rawhides and other pet treats (see pig ears, bully sticks, horns and hooves). Human medications are even made from slaughter byproducts (insulin from pancreas and thyroxine from thyroid glands, for example). “Beef tallow” has made a fad appearance in cosmetics and skin treatments recently, but is really rendered fat from the slaughter industry (where all manner of nasty residues live - I wouldn’t want to slather that anywhere). While I applaud trying to use every part of an animal that was slaughtered for food, this is a backwards way of trying to clean up the mass amount of undesirable byproduct from slaughtering an excessive amount of animals daily.

The final hours of these animal’s lives are very dismal. They are packed onto shipping trucks, where if they survive that, are prodded off onto a killing assembly line. Death is not achieved before the butchering begins, since stunning or insensitivity at the least is not reliably done every time, even though required. Halal type slaughtering can be just as bad, since the cultural requirement is the animal bleed out while it’s alive and sentient. Poultry are usually hung by their feet and dunked into an electrified pool before continuing on down the line to be cut up. Slaughterhouse employees are subject to one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, are usually marginalized and immigrant people groups, and suffer extreme stress, anger and anxiety from the tasks they perform.

It is a hard subject to tackle and talk about, so my point here is not to enforce my points, but to increase awareness amongst consumers so they can make better choices for themselves. I believe educated decisions made by consumers will have a positive trickle down effect on these three reasons: health, environment and livestock management. Ok, soap box put away…back to the ranch:

The homestead setting on our small ranch requires management and welfare decisions every day. Even though our diet at home is plant-based by choice, with the exception of eating out or when someone cooks for us, managing the birds is necessary. Thanksgiving 2023 was a five month old tom from our own hatch and the first whole bird I’ve cooked in 23 years of marriage! Every step was done here on our ranch. Was it difficult? No…because following I can demonstrate the intentionality and care that went into it. I name hatches in batches I can trace and track together and these turkeys were named after the “Money Heist” show. This clutch was the second successful hatch of the year by tom Al and hen Bill. She sat all summer long during a very hot summer and most of the eggs hatched June 26. The original plan for this hatch was to see them develop (colors, sex) and sell or give them away. Five poults were making a go of it, three Narrangansetts (Moscú, Nairobi and Río) and two Royal Palms (Tokyo and Denver). Río at about two weeks of age was clearly a runt and development slowed compared to the others. This in itself would have ensured that he remained out of the gene pool, but he fell into a trough one day with triple digit heat and drowned. Someone contacted me about the two Royal Palms and bought them a few weeks later (ended up being two males). Nairobi during development was always meeker and a bit lackluster compared to Moscú and had a slight crook in his neck. As November approached, we discussed using him for Thanksgiving, keeping Moscú as a backup breeding tom and began making preparations. Heritage turkeys for eating should be seven to eighteen months old, depending on the level of fat and muscle development desired. I will say, attempting to work at all with an eighteen month old turkey tom is not high on my priority list - Al is a big boy for a Royal Palm, over 20 lbs and even though not aggressive, hard to catch and handle for exams and treatment. Nairobi was likely under 10 lbs at five months (I didn’t weigh him before, only after cooking and deboning to get an idea) and fully developed and feathered. Up to a few weeks before Thanksgiving, I wasn’t sure he was a he, but it was very helpful to have his siblings (Bob hen from April hatch and his brother, Moscú) to compare to since he was a bit of a late bloomer. Ultimately the Narrangansett coloring was the biggest hint (Bob has a grayer neck whereas Moscú and Nairobi stayed darker and shinier), along with size (at five months the boys were already larger than Bob is, three months older).

I had done a lot of research as far as methods, techniques and tips for dispatching, butchering and cooking turkeys to prepare. If this part makes you queasy, I encourage to push through, not to skip this part, in the interest of educating yourself where your food comes from and how it’s “made”.

My preferred method of dispatching turkeys is the “broomstick” method, which doesn’t describe the Wicked Witch, but instead using a stick behind the bird’s skull as leverage to dislocate the neck and spine. I had used this method once before on my Slate hen, Hilary, not for eating but due to an injury she couldn’t recover from. My first attempts on both of them were not successful, but didn’t result in any injury to the birds since they both jumped up and tried to run away. So that’s my first tip - tie up the legs just in this case, so they can’t run far away. I couldn’t tie Hilary’s legs or carry her upside down until calming down as recommended, because one of her legs had healed in a backwards position and she had lived a year pegleg pirate style. I would not have gotten to this point with her, except after helping Bill hatch out Bob’s clutch she didn’t regain strength enough to stand and was developing bedsores while being picked on by the flock.

Hilary in the foreground with her odd leg

Hilary I could catch and carry Heisman style, while Nairobi was allowed to sleep on a roost with the flock overnight as he normally did, even though I made sure they had no access to food after supper. I caught his legs from the perch and held him upside down until he calmed enough for Heisman, about ten seconds. Some people are concerned about the bird during this upside down period, but it’s important to me to be able to quickly get them under control and under my arm without flapping or struggling so they don’t injure themselves. Whether they’re slaughtered in a factory or at home in a kill cone, both of which require being upside down, here this part only lasts a few seconds and doesn’t stress the bird compared to other options. In the future, this would also be the time to tie the legs snugly only to prevent running.

For me as a petite person and considering the length of full grown turkeys, I need to have someone else hold the stick in place while I do the pulling. Instant death happens with this method if done right, as both the spinal cord and major blood vessels disconnect at the same time. What no one could ever prepare me for enough (so here it is for your benefit) is the amount of reflexive flapping that happens when butchering poultry. “Like a chicken with its head cut off” is not hyperbole, but also why any cutting or chopping methods were ultimately too bloody for me to attempt in this situation - I do keep a hatchet close as backup. Even though I checked to make sure death was instant (eyes closed, no breathing, neck bones clearly disconnected), the flapping of the wings can take minutes and be in phases. I lay them on the ground for this and let it happen until it’s fully over. There is bleeding out of the meat, but it happens into the neck skin around the dislocation and all of that area is cut out and discarded during butchering.

The next part - and this is seriously onerous - is plucking. The way I decided to do it was the scald and hand pluck route vs. the machines, mainly because I don’t have one and don’t do this enough to merit buying one. We used a wheeled muck cart filled with hot water from the tap, topped off with a boiling kettleful and the largest potful we own. The desired temp was 140F or a tad lower (we’re scalding, not cooking, which would result in the skin tearing) which we got with a laser thermometer. Any larger of a turkey would need a bigger bucket - we struggled even with this five month old. I tried dunking the entire bird in the water by the legs, but didn’t account for it floating, so I had to use something to push it down into the water for a few minutes to scald.

Because of this and a little bit of poo that came out, next time I will place the bird in the cart and pour the water over it instead of dunking. After the scalding, we placed the bird on a fold out game cleaning table that drained over the compost pile. I had prepared a double-bagged bucket for refuse and most of the feathers, but this way the flyaways and rinse water went into the compost. Plucking takes a long time, even with help and avoiding the tail (I cut this all off and threw it away, to the chagrin of some folks who claim it’s the best part to eat) and wings (I ended up cutting the primary feathers near the skin since they just would not pluck out). I had planned to leave the skin on during cooking, but not eat it - none of us like eating the skin anyway. I understood why most industrial breeds of poultry are white, because there was no way this Narrangansett would ever have the clean dimply skin look expected from supermarket birds (but again, we weren’t going to attempt to eat the skin anyway). Being five months old, there were some feathers that were still developing, especially on the chest and back area near the neck that looked like a feather inside a tube. Plucking these feathers out left behind a weird fatty plug, but after cooking I never noticed these anymore.

After plucking, butchering begins, starting with removing the head by cutting around and through the dislocated part (throw in the trash). A super sharp and slightly curved fillet knife is my go to for this, and wear a cut proof glove on your non dominant hand (trust me on this, no matter how confident you are). Next, go to the legs and bend them as if the bird was laying down, cutting through the ligaments at the back of the “knee”/hock. You should see the inside of the joint and the ends of the leg bones or keep slicing. Then, bend the knees the other direction (slice through skin to help removal) or even sideways to separate at the joint. I remove the tail at this point, along with the fan feathers I didn’t bother to pluck. Anything done at this end needs to be very respectful of the anus to avoid contaminating the meat with intestine juices. Cuts can be made through the skin away from the pucker part of the anus, but you want to keep it intact to flip the innards out without tainting the meat.

Way before this point, though, it’s important you have a very decent grasp of anatomy of birds especially. You need to be able to visually and easily identify important landmarks (windpipe/trachea vs. esophagus, heart, lungs, liver, intestines, crop/stomach and the green gallbladder that contains bile you really don’t want to get anywhere other than the trash can). You will need to be able to separate the organs from the bones and muscles by gently tearing away the fascia. This is also the time to be examining for disease or abnormalities in your flock. In this case with Nairobi, I already knew he had a kink in his neck, and examined it carefully while butchering to compare what I had felt externally during exams while the poults were growing. Examine eyes and nostrils (no gunk), the skin (bruising in poultry shows up as an unappealing green color that may or may not affect the meat underneath), legs and feet (no open sores/swelling in the joints), feathers (no mites or lice? even though these don’t affect the meat, but do require a better management strategy for the rest of the flock), and internal organs. The heart should be of normal size and the color of a cartoon heart. The liver should be a brownish red, smooth, shiny and with no lesions. Intestines should be uniform in thickness and color all the way through. In some cases, you can see internal parasites (worms) while butchering and need to treat the living birds if you see this. If you find something that makes you doubt eating the meat, abide by your instinct. You can still proceed with the butchering to increase your experience with that and training yourself to perform necropsies.

Being petite in this case is an advantage, as the best tool for this job is a small hand that can work at the fascia by wiggling fingers. If you want to keep gizzards for gravy, you’ll want to keep the neck (skin removed), heart and liver. Give everything a good rinse and store in a ziploc bag. Some people add the crop to the gizzards, but you must be able to locate it, half it, rinse out any grit or food, and peel the tough surface that does the digesting, only keeping the muscle tissue of the crop. I boil these parts with salt and bay leaves for the broth part of the gravy. Throw away the neck bones, strain it well before adding to the gravy roux and give the heart/crop/liver to your dogs - they are nutritious. The roux (a sautéed flour base for gravy or gumbo depending on how dark it gets) can be made with the fat drippings, wine and flour cooked in a frying pan until the desired color, add the broth to desired runnyness and serve immediately. No need for those nasty packets and even my gravy haters enjoy this gravy.

Unless you’re a fast butcher and cooking right away, you will have to deal with rigor mortis in the bird, which goes away after days. You know those campfire supper scenes in movies where easily recognizable shapes are being spit cooked? Well, that’s rigor. A floppy bird is easier to prepare for cooking regardless of method than a rigid one, but other than that doesn’t affect quality or flavor. Some people do this with turkeys by letting them rest in an ice water bath inside a cooler. I did mine by propping him up on foil balls inside a baking bag in the fridge. I was expecting the juices that run out of supermarket birds and wanted to elevate him above that, but there was none of that. Thinking back, I think the nasty ooze from those birds comes from the sodium injections and acid washes the birds get in the factory and this fresh bird simply didn’t ooze. Three days was not enough for rigor to pass, but a Thanksgiving timeline meant I needed to roast him the day before. I sprinkled the skin and whatever fell inside the cavity with seasoned salt. I sprayed the pan my roasting rack went into with cooking spray, added the rack and the bird, breast side up and legs tied at 375F for an hour. Then I took the bird out, tented foil over the breast area, lowered the oven to 350F, poured white wine in the bottom of the pan, and put the bird back in rotated around for even baking. After two hours, I temperature tested the leg joint and checked juices to ensure full cooking (it was) and let it rest with the foil on for 15 minutes. For this size bird, this ensured fully cooked without overdone while a lot of the wine evaporated into steam, but still leaving a lot of drippings for the gravy, no butter insertion or basting required. Those steps are necessary for fully cooking such a large bird for a long time without it drying out, but this heritage guy was ready after just three hours. My family doesn’t eat the skin, but it was mostly golden and crispy on the top side of the bird. I didn’t weigh the bird before, but after deboning and throwing away the skin and more “taste tests” than I could count from a family that is meh about turkey to begin with, we had 3.6 lbs of pure meat with a noticeable difference in color between white and dark meat. Our family Thanksgiving tradition (being meh about turkey, remember?) is to roll cooked turkey meat in tortillas and deep fry them to make flautas or ‘turquitos’. We had more than enough for that day and an entire week of school lunches afterwards. The flavor was best freshly baked and warm, not a hint of gameyness or overwhelming poultry flavor, mild and pleasant, neither dry nor overly juicy.

Credit to this hardy, large bird. Would I do it again? Yes, if I had a bird on hand that needed to be managed. Otherwise, I enjoy seeing them grow, the intelligence and societal dynamics of this truly American bird. Gobble, gobble!

Resources

This is what the ancient Mexicans thought turkeys looked like - I agree.

TCG site on turkey colors/genetics

Porter’s poults and feathers, an incredibly detailed study on colors and genetics.

A favorite time sink of mine, the turkey color calculator based on genetics!

A robot vacuum for dead poultry…shouldn’t even be necessary but it is.

Antibiotic resistance and its true source - educate your doctor on this one!

Food security dependent on limited foodstuffs from The Livestock Conservancy.

The data on the meat industry here.

Why American eggs are washed and refrigerated compared to other parts of the world where they are stored at ambient temperature. Read carefully where it says this washing and refrigeration treat bacteria ON the shell but does nothing for bacteria IN the egg, which is eliminated by any proper cooking technique. This washing and refrigeration is essentially attacking a red herring and wasting resources while not acknowledging the real source of contamination - a factory created super bug.

Drinking milk is for baby cows, not humans.

How Not to Die by Michael Greger, MD. 2015

Food Choice and Sustainability by Dr. Richard Oppenlander. 2013

Just one of the studies on slaughterhouse employees, there are a lot out there.

An excellent start to finish video guide on processing chickens by Self Sufficient Hub. I watched this multiple times and took written step by step notes. It will help you prepare, but nothing teaches better than experience and you will learn tricks or interesting things with every experience.

*Prions are really bad guys the CDC isn’t even sure what they are, but cause some really nasty and persistent wasting diseases in people and animals.

First, do a soil test. What? I don’t have time for that…much less to test multiple areas to determine what’s wrong with each and how to fix it. Where we live, the “soil” consists of clay over sheets of limestone. Clay is impossible for most anything to grow in, because its density retains too much water that when it dries out (every summer from February to November) creates large cracks. The only things that do well with minimal intervention (cutting off dead bits is all) are agaves and red yucca because of its taproot. Everything else needs amendments, watering and fertilizing.

Soil improvement for clay would involve gently mixing sand and organic material to a depth of halfway to China whilst aerating and not further compacting over a span of a century. Yeah, also not really doable for me. Despite paying good money for a gardening class (I’m that bad at it/desperate) with an amazing teacher, I even fail at composting.

Have you tried it? Mixing ratios of green and brown, turning it over like a pancake every day, some people even stick thermometers in there to see if baby is running hot or too cold (?) and are rewarded with abundant, happy crops. If you’re one of those people, this is not the site for you…you don’t have to leave, but I envy you and your abilities! If you’re like me, a plant murderer and a compost failure, please stick around and let me share some tips with you.

1. I don’t aim for compost because that’s still out of my league yet. I aim for “soil amendment” based on what I need and have on hand. What I need is to “lighten up” the clay which is achieved by adding anything, so my brand of compost works here. Clay soils also tend to be alkaline (basic) and many of the things I add to my compost are acidic to help even that out. Fertilizing is accomplished through the decomposition of the compost as well as the ingredients from the “what I have on hand” part.

   Recently, I started saving kitchen scraps in a small tub next to our sink. What goes in there travels to the compost pile where it becomes minimal-effort soil amendments as well as another significant benefit that is keeping 20-50% of “stuff” out of the landfill. What doesn’t go: meat, bones, grease, cheese, fatty stuff (nasty smells plus attracts varmits). What does go: eggshells, all vegetable clippings, skins, seeds, stems, except citrus*, coffee grounds with filters. In our household, the coffee grounds are a daily and considerable occurrence, so being able to chuck them, filter and all, into the pile is satisfying. Coffee grounds are acidic, for plants that love acid soil, but mixed in with the compost buffers it for the plants and the coffee smells nice. The paper will break down as well and counts as a brown ingredient (more on that later).

   The other compost component I have on hand, every day, forever, abundantly, is manure. You urbanites cannot use this as an ingredient, since dog and cat skat being so heavily meat-based cannot be used in composting. Our ‘stead has a combination of horse and poultry manure, mixed with shavings and straw. It’s actually a highly technical ratio of which I allow the animals to determine the exact blend every day. Manure counts as a green ingredient, whereas both straw and shavings are considered brown.

   

   The hay burners taking a nap.

   Let’s talk about manure, baby. Fresh horse manure can burn plants - is what you’ll see everywhere, and yet, after many years of feeding, owning, feeding, riding, mucking, feeding, and hauling horses, I have yet to see evidence of this. Since I don’t own a manure spreader - scratch that, I AM the manure spreader bwahahahahaha! I often will collect fresh piles from the pasture on my way between mucking the barn and the compost pile. I have never seen “burned” plants under the piles. The owner of one of the barns I stalled my horse at would rope off an area of lawn, add horse manure, water once a day, and in a week have green grass growing that would eventually get thicker and rope removed, would allow horses to munch on between rides. He must be one of those gifted compost folks! But anyway, despite all of the warnings about adding fresh manure to plants, I have not been so exacting. It could also be a factor of what the horses are eating - mine are 80-90% forage with a small bit of grain tossed in, so I imagine a higher amount of grain could cause really potent poo that could burn plants.

   Another important aspect of mucking stalls for your compost is the urine from horses. Moisture and the ingredients in urine are great for your pile! My gardening teacher proudly showed us his assembly-line compost piles and stated he would regularly “water” his piles because it was so beneficial (he lived alone un- or perhaps intentionally). The mares I’ve owned have been horrible pigs while in a stall, peeing a lot and walking through and over their apples until every time I muck, I have to basically strip the stall. Geldings are generally neater and my current hay burner usually leaves his in convenient non walked-through piles I can easily clean up.

   After mucking, I follow up with a deodorizer/drying agent on wet spots. My favorite for stalls or coops is Sweet PDZ or equivalent. This is a clay-based powder that is safe and helps cut down nasty and dangerous ammonia and absorb smells. When I strip stalls for the season, I always do a generous layer of this and allow a few days to fully dry before adding straw or shavings again. This is also perfectly fine to get into your compost pile and won’t affect a thing.

   Turkey manure (this is a family site, I can’t use the colloquial term) like its cousin chicken, is high in nitrogen (green) and also has the fame of burning plants when added directly. I haven’t seen this happen, either, mostly because I end up mucking turkey droppings along with the shavings it’s dropped in. It seems to hold its shape until a lot of watering and breaking down occurs. I used to just sweep it out of the barn vs. adding it to the pile and read somewhere that it can take a year to see results of the fertilizing effect. Having more turkeys plus mucking everything at the same time means I have been adding it to the pile where it quickly blends in. My determination on the fertilizing ability of turkey manure (composted or not) is still pending.

   Duck manure…wow, this is a force unto itself! Maybe I should talk first about goose manure, or “goose logs” as they’re known in my family, deposited on the back porch, driveway and sidewalks. Geese eat mostly plants, green or dying, and drink a lot of water, so their poo is similar to horse manure although thankfully smaller in size (but not amount). Once it dries some, it basically can be swept away. Now, duck poo is a multi-colored, multi-cultural, vertical and horizontal skidmark you should be prepared for often and everywhere if you’re even considering being around ducks. It is wonderful for the compost pile, but is a free spirit and cannot be contained or forced to choose a major. The only way I can add it to the pile is by mucking out the duck stall (the geese, ducks and rebel turkey Bob sleep in there). The stall has deep-ish straw, because I store the bales in there and the geese shred the haystrings which leads to a cycle of mucking-straw deposits-mucking. Straw does not absorb water (compared to shavings or even pelleted shavings that break down into a sawdust), so makes an excellent addition to your pile or can be used straight away to mulch plants. I’m pretty sure waterfoul poo (that’s not a typo) can go straight on plants without allegedly burning, but I’d stick to only using it on outdoor plants.

   

   Naps and poo always go together.

2. As promised, Nitrogen (green) and Carbon (brown) components are the building blocks to your compost. A one green to three brown is ideal. Now, having said that, this part was also daunting and confusing to me. Who is out there measuring ratios in a compost pile, making a list and checking it twice to see if it’s been nitrogen or nice? Compost Santa, hurry down this chimney tonight!

   Things in the compost ratio actually match their color: manure is green, straw/shavings are brown, coffee is - wait, that’s where it kind of breaks down (haha, see what I did there?). Actually, more than not, the color doesn’t match the category, so instead of trying to keep up with a list, I try to think in terms of what a possible ingredient can contribute to the compost. Feathers, especially with a growing, mixed flock that molts several times a year, are good for composting as a green and it’s not like I can separate the feathers out while mucking anyway! Feathermeal is a sizeable byproduct to the slaughter industry, so is packaged and sold as an ingredient in pet foods or fertilizers. Feathers are basically straight up protein (your birds will need more protein while molting to make healthy new feathers) and have a high amount of nitrogen to contribute to the pile. Ashes from fireplace and firepit, especially from hardwoods like the oak we burn a lot of, is another good compost ingredient as a brown. Just make sure it’s days old and cold so you don’t set your garden on fire (true story, just ask my dad if the compost in the garden is flammable). Yard clippings is a Janus ingredient, depending on what it is or contains more of, but thankfully follows the color code - green grass, plants are green and dry leaves, sticks are brown. Paper is a brown if you need to bulk up that ratio or just don’t want to separate out the coffee filters or tea bags. I do struggle with big chunks of cardboard or layers of newspaper breaking down adequately, so prefer to burn those in my firepit first and add later as ash.

   I also add to the scrap tub the uh, residue from our indoor birds: paper linings from their cage bottoms, their poops, feathers and seed hulls from their food. This is probably an even steven mix of green (poop, feathers) to brown (paper, seed hulls) instead of one to three.

   

   The feathered weasels, Príncipe Pío and Atocha, contributing to the compost.

3. Water or moisture is also important to compost because without it, or if allowed to dry out, your browns will blow away in the wind while your greens won’t break down, they will just shrivel and not be useable. If you don’t get enough water added regularly (through ingredients or rainfall), a sprinkler right over your pile just ten minutes a day before you turn is necessary. Also, all of the bug friends you need for good compost (roly polys, earthworms and the like) appreciate moist environments without being soggy.

4. Turning or mixing. If you want a ringside seat, the debate on how often you should turn the pile is stimulating. I am in the not-every-day camp myself, mostly because I have other things going on that preclude me from massaging the pile every day. When it’s wintertime, I end up turning it daily simply because I have overnight stalls to muck every day and am already there. Otherwise, I wait until my scrap tub is getting full or the pile looks kind of dried out on top. When I turn it, I end up either moving the pile while turning it over or piling it taller on itself. I try to leave a trench or bare area for the next time I add scraps, so they end up being buried on the bottom and break down faster. Any chunks I discover while turning I attempt to leave inside or under the pile instead of on top - you don’t want all that composty goodness walking off and not contributing to your plants!

   

   The wheelbarrowfuls from the barn every morning don’t get put in these trenches, but tacked on to the edge so they can age a few days before getting turned in to the older pile, which brings us to

5. Location. Where to put the thing? For urbanites, there are plenty of container composters available, even ones that can be turned over on a swivel. Pro tip for any of us - beyond the smell or proximity to coop, access to it by critters, etc. is to locate it near water! No one wants to haul buckets to water a compost heap and end up losing it all through drying out, so locate it near a water source or reachable by hose, preferably with a sprinkler attached. You don’t want streambeds cut through your pile or all of the compost juice to run off, either.

6. Temperature. Ok here’s where I really get lost in the woods. Apparently, compost has to “cook” to a certain temperature to kill Pathogens and Weed Seeds (hmm…this is going to be the name of my cover band). My compost has never gotten warm beyond whatever ambient temp is, as far as I can tell. The verdict on how my soil amendments (not compost, right?) will perform, both applied directly and in containers** is still pending on how my plants do in 2024. My horses eat dried forage hays or graze on the pasture, so I’m not sure “weed seeds” is anything I can worry about or even control. I haven’t seen any seeds make it through my flock’s manure (they all have a crop with grit in it to break their food down) and the indoor birds don’t usually let a good seed get past them. If there happens to be one that does get through and germinates successfully, it’s not anything I’d mind growing anyway (millet, peas, safflowers). Plus, there is a bonus to being a plant murderer in that if you germinate and grow successfully under MY watch, you deserve to be here!

Alright, time to get working on your own pile! How do you know if it’s good enough? A big tell is the smell…decomposition or rotting smell is bad, so troubleshoot if it was an ingredient or too much moisture? Throw it out or spread it all out to dry and start over. An earthy smell is what you’re look-sniffing for and means it’s working. Even if things get funky, you’ve learned and tried something new, kept things out of the landfill, and are contributing to soil and water locally for yourself but also contributing to our planet. Score!

References

The EPA’s informational site on composting and landfills. It’s mostly accurate, except for the table on methane emissions that completely ignores raising livestock (especially cows) as a principal source of methane beyond oil and gas. The landfill information is relevant to us all, whether urban or rural, in our case, which have to pay for garbage pickup and disposal services that don’t offer bells and whistles such as recycling.

*Citrus in the compost is usually listed as a no due to the chemicals sprayed on the peels and being a deterrent/killer for the insects you actually want to attract to your pile to help break it down. I have not set a hard ban on citrus in the scrap tub because I don’t want to have too many rules for the cooks (my husband and son) that would discourage them from using the scrap tub. The bulk of my pile usually makes up for any citrus chunks, usually halves from juicing/garnishing, which take longer to break down but don’t seem to deter any insects from what I’ve observed.

**I discovered a good use for all of those empty feed sacks from horse and poultry food. I layer manure, straw, shavings, etc. and shake them down, topping off with a straw layer. I want to see if this method can help skip the composting part and still work to grow things in “containers”. These babies will be exposed to the elements along the fenceline before I add plants and should result at the very least in “rotted manure”, even if I have to dump it out. If the bags last a season or more as a container, eventually the contents will be dumped anyway to bolster topsoil or pretend to be mulch.

Why Homesteading? I think there are a lot of broad and deep reasons that most of us will coincide on as far as why the drive and concept of homesteading are important and relevant in this time. Regardless of the size of your plot (more on that later), a notion of homesteading will only help you and yours. A homestead was a tract of land given to be worked so everyone could have “a fair chance”. In 1862, that was 160 acres (yowza) of federal land to help persons move into and tame the West. Nowadays, a homestead is considerably and usually less acreage and meant more for independence and sustenance than filling up wild zip codes. Homesteading means using your own resources masterfully (and mostly, creatively) to lessen your dependence on public systems, ensure food supply (at least, for your household) and ideally, create a surplus you can use to improve or build back into your homestead. While I tell you about our experience (I promise it’s relevant to yours), feel free to indulge your own creative process with notes, doodles, questions, etc. on how this could apply to or help you.

We have five acres in the Texas Westoplex, a land of brutal, dry summers and (thankfully) most mild winters with an occasional snowpocalypse thrown in. We have about .2 inches of soil…no, scratch that…clay followed up immediately by sheets of limestone that make digging for any reason a nightmare (so no T-posts, buried family pets, or heavy gardening). The great news is, if you don’t shatter your spine by attempting to dig or have access to heavy machinery, you can find a lot of neat fossils from when this area was muddy and walked across by dinosaurs (not a lot of money in that since most “fossils” now are made in China and were historically made by moonlighting moonshiners-it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?).

Meleagris gallopavo tracks in mud dating to the Springtaceous period.

Our place has a bunch of oaks (live? post? I’m still not sure, or we have a mix), cedars (those evil pollen-releasing haters), weird plants (milkweed-good or bad? pokeweed-good or bad? poison ivy-all bad) and a few critters outside of official flock members. The best critter I discovered lives here are Roadrunners. Beyond meep meep fame, these fascinating birds are members of the cuckoo family and eat a good amount of reptiles and snakes. If the babies can’t handle a particularly long snake at the time it’s fed, the remaining bit hangs out of their beak while the rest is being digested. This is good news for us as allegedly, copperheads are drawn to lay under oak trees where they are perfectly camouflaged to eat molting cicadas, a favorite snack of theirs. This past year we dispatch-err, rehomed four of them to a better place along with rat snakes that developed a taste for murdering ducklings.

So the first order of business for me as Flockherd was to find an animal that could eat bugs and weeds that was hardy. Chickens were a no-go (not hardy enough). So I settled on turkeys, aided by a lady that was selling a few for $18 each nearby. Over time and a lot of learning processes, I believe turkeys were a great choice for my situation, even as a novice. The ones I bought and brought home inside a mesh bag (our furniture had been delivered in it and worked well as long as they were kept semi-confined so their nails didn’t poke through) were heritage turkeys, the perfect intermediate between the wild, rangy turkeys and the mutant obscenities everyone gets at the supermarket. I confidently brought home a Bronze/Blue mix male and two Slate females that were roughly two-three months old. The interwebs warned that turkey poults (don’t call them turkey chicks in my vicinity) shouldn’t be “on the ground” until they were older since they are fragile. I kept them locked in a stall for a few days before allowing them to range in the pasture while I babysat and eventually left the door open as they would come out in the morning and return in the evening to roost on top of the stalls, or even on the barn roof itself. Word of warning…heritage turkeys can aim and fly quite well, and love roofs of things like cars and anyplace you don’t want them. I didn’t see much weed eating, but they work well for bugs, especially things like june beetles, crickets and locusts. Over time, I discovered that Bronze/Blue mix didn’t exist and wasn’t male, but that turkey hens can and will strut and even gobble (I have video proof along with lots of hunters on YouTube). More on all the turkey info you might want on my Turkeys post.

The turkey OGs hanging out on the porch looking like an album cover.

The second focus for us was to manage the greenery. The trees were all unwieldy and overgrown and the pasture was a solid knee high weed of inedible variety. “You should get a goat!” No - goats, just like our already existent horses, will only eat what they prefer and leave the rest unless they are tied or fenced to the area you want trimmed. We hired a tractor to come mow the pasture and haven’t needed to since. I have managed with our ride-on to keep the rock-free areas manageable and provide lower areas the horses prefer to graze in. The trees have slowly but surely over a few years been a source of fencewood, firewood and decorations. Pruning can only occur in the winter when the tree is dormant or in the case of dangerous or already dead branches.

So, where are you in your notes? What do you need to get started and how do you measure success?

The first step is inventory - what resources do you have right now? Only include the working and ready access resources (well, a run in shed could go here or eventually I’d like to fence this area…etc. count as expansions whereas faulty or unusable resources need to be fixed or gotten rid of before they can be included).

How much land/space do you have? This doesn’t need to be acreage and could even be your apartment roof or balcony if that’s all you can start with. The choices of what goes on there are dependent on this step and being realistic instead of dreaming.

Water will be your next critical resource to consider. Where does it come from (city, well, irrigation) and how is it accessed throughout your area or is it confined to one location you’ll have to work to expand (buckets, hoses). Hauling water to different areas has huge disadvantages, but is not impossible to deal with. Gardening will strain your water resources, so management is critical (timers, sprinklers, soakers, drought survivors, etc.).

Sunlight is also important, especially considering a smaller space available or for example, heavily wooded or shaded or not oriented adequately. Livestock will require shade as well as most productive plants.

On to livestock…your space will determine how many and what type of animals you can have, since many chickens can “fit” in the space one bull does, but there are other factors that come into play as well.

What do you need? Skills are a must, but I will say as a lifelong learner and bit of a maverick, don’t let the unknown be or remain ignorance. All living things have basic needs, but there is skill and art in developing them in a way that thrives. If you’re not sure or don’t know, ASK and TRY. This is where another necessity comes in - find a community. Human beings do not thrive or even survive alone, so find a community that has some similarities to you and your goals, but also have differing opinions and experiences to help you grow. Check the References part to see sites and apps that have been crucial to my development.

The nutshell: if you read nothing else, read this part: the thing you’ll need most of, is TIME. Time to plan and do research. Time to communicate and be active in your community[communities]. Time to allow your flock, herd and garden to grow. This is not a criticism on you, or a failing, despite how easy it is to think that. I wanted to get started and set up and be off running fast, but good things take time and every season will teach new things or cement old things. Always view time as a positive instead of criticizing yourself by comparing to others. Part of time management is to not add anything new or unproven to your dynamic more than once a year, depending on its size and impact. Chicken math is always acceptable at any point (the more, the fluffier!) whereas putting in a pond is an example of this. Big changes require more assessment and the ability to analyze (that worked, didn’t work, or could work with some tweaks).

Feel free to message me or comment if you want to share or get my input and Happy Homesteading!

References (not following any format, just in case you feel like fact checking and/or falling down any research rabbit holes!)

The history of the homestead and the Homestead Act https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/index.htm#:~:text=The%20Homestead%20Act%20of%201862,woman%20a%20%22fair%20chance.%22

Rocks, tracks and caves in Central and South Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Rose_Formation

Footprints and moonshine - just look up “The Alvis Delk print controversy”

The Livestock Conservancy protects breeds from extinction and provides comparison charts and breeder’s directory. https://livestockconservancy.org/about-us/

Backyard Chickens is an amazing forum, resource and community for all kinds of poultry, not just chickens. It has a search function that helps search diseases, genetics, sales, medications, incubating and beyond as well as some addicting photo contests.

Available as an app for phones, iNaturalist can identify plants, animals, insects, and mushrooms (with a caveat every time!) through photos or search and contributes to multiple research projects.

Images are AI generated for fun or my personal photos, unless credited or an internet meme designed to make you laugh.