![I hope I'm not the only one doing this. [2448x3264 - 699KB]](https://pic8.co/sh/ON23Lt.jpg){kind=link}
Do you also eat them? I was curious why people do ducks of chickens give good eggs.
Heck ya. They are delicious, better than rabbit for small homestead and more fat, which is why you can’t live on rabbit. They clean fast too, just skin them. Plucking is a thing I have never understood how people justify that much time… duck can be served in all sorts of ways, but duck breast cooks up like a good filet mignon.
I have a homemade chicken plucker, works great. Takes me about 4 minutes per bird, from kill to in the ice water. Thinking about a drill attachment for ducks because you can’t scald them. What breed of duck do you do? We have some silver appleyards that are still young.
Oh, I scalded 10 ducks on Sunday. My chicken plucker did most of the work.
For duck, you want to time the kill for right before molting. The plucking goes better.
Care to share a picture of that plucker?
Swedish we’re ok, Pekins better but dumb, the silvers are good usually. A few mixed breeds we had were good, the best was the buff. Big, good tendencies, fast growing.
I never tried duck, but their eggs are better than chickens.
Ducks are so much easier. They don't peck each other to death. In fact, they won't fight at all if you raise them together and only keep one male past maturity. Even if you break these rules that won't fight much. They can handle colder weather (they don't need a coop in most of the US, just a predator-proof run). The two big downsides are they they poop a huge amount and they are hard to pluck.
Ducks and chickens taste differently, as do their eggs. It makes for good variation, though ultimately you get better yield with the chickens.
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