Poultry Keepers Podcast

Introductiopn to Waterfowl-Part 1

• Rip Stalvey, John Gunterman, and Mandelyn Royal • Season 2 • Episode 86

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In this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, hosts John Gunterman, Mandelyn Royal, and Rip Stalvey discuss the fundamentals of keeping waterfowl such as ducks and geese. They cover the growing popularity of waterfowl for benefits like eggs, meat, pest control, and entertainment. 

The conversation addresses the key considerations for beginners, including choosing the right breeds based on goals (e.g., meat or egg production), ethical down harvesting, and special uses of specific breeds. They highlight practical aspects like waterfowl’s need for water, differences between breeds, incubation processes, and common challenges. 

The episode also covers interesting breed features and historical insights, offering a comprehensive guide for new waterfowl keepers.

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Alex:

Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast, where we talk poultry from feathers to function. In this episode John Gunterman, Mandelyn Royal, and Rip Stallvee are talking about the basics of keeping waterfowl.

Yeah. Yeah.

John Gunterman:

​Waterfowl, including ducks and geese are increasingly popular additions to backyard flocks. They provide many benefits from eggs and meat to pest control and entertainment. For those new to keeping waterfowl, understanding their unique needs and characteristics is essential. This podcast hopes to address some of the common questions about waterfowl breeds, care, nutrition, breeding. Practical uses and basically give you a good guide for getting out of the gate and getting started. Yeah, Rip can fix that in post production. We call that the pregnant pause. We'll start at the top. You know what, when we're talking about waterfowl I immediately think to the wild native waterfowl that I have in the pond and the reason that I can't have waterfowl, cause it's too much of a cross contamination risk. But what are we talking about? about domesticated waterfowl in the first place?

Rip Stalvey:

I think that somebody just starting out, it's just like starting out with chickens. What's your goals? What do you want to accomplish? And then begin looking at what breed will help you do that the best. Do you want meat? Then I'd look at breeds like Peking ducks geese, particularly the Emden geese are good at that. Muscovies are a lot of folks love to eat Muscovies. And really they're much more like a goose than they are a duck.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yes, they are.

Rip Stalvey:

They don't quack for one thing, but are

John Gunterman:

any of them available for down harvesting? That's my only association with the Canada goose is the beautiful down that we get from them because it's so warm.

Rip Stalvey:

John, I'm not really up to speed on down harvesting, but I would imagine that they are and some breeds like our Emden's and Toulouse and all that are larger than the Canada goose. So I would think that you would get more down off of that than you would. I was looking

John Gunterman:

for, an ethical source for down. use a lot of it up here in Vermont for insulation in our clothing.

Rip Stalvey:

I can imagine that, if somebody wants duck eggs and there's getting to be a pretty good business people selling duck eggs for food consumption,

John Gunterman:

they're delicious.

Rip Stalvey:

I think hands down the two best breeds would be runner ducks, sometimes called Indian runner ducks, and they're very upright. I always describe them as looking like a folded up umbrella on feet running around because they're very upright. Got that little. Head that shoots out there at a cute angle, but another one would be khaki campbells. Those are good egg layers, too

Mandelyn Royal:

They're probably the best egg layers for the ducks and I really enjoy duck eggs for baking There's a slight difference in the texture when you compare it to a chicken egg. So it really helps to hold up your baked goods just a little bit different than a chicken egg would do it.

John Gunterman:

It's a different type of protein than is in common poultry. If you have albumin allergies, your allergist usually recommends you go to duck eggs, and then if you can't tolerate duck eggs, you come to quail.

Rip Stalvey:

I know a lot of folks are getting back to the runner ducks, go with runners because they're a slightly smaller duck, but they still lay a good size egg and they don't require as much feed per dozen eggs. They have better food conversion than some of the other breeds most commonly associated with.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, they're not quite as heavy as the others. No, they're

Rip Stalvey:

not. They're also one of those breeds that make really good buggers. There's, particularly out over in France, they have, I've seen videos where they, this big semi, it looks like a cattle truck. It's got those ventilated sides on it, but there's about four or five layers. Of floors in that thing and every one is just crammed full of runner ducks and they have this little ramp down there And they just all just file out single file zoom Go right out into the fields and start eating bugs and snails. Use them a lot in I can't it's not in wine grapes because they eat all the bugs off the wine grapes

John Gunterman:

It's a beautiful system. It's I don't even want to use the analogy, almost nevermind, but the beekeeping industry travels around with bees for pollination, which is a horrible practice, but using natural systems to do your pest management the way nature intended it.

Rip Stalvey:

Oh, absolutely.

John Gunterman:

The ducks are eating exactly the most beautiful diet they can fresh every day and providing an amazing service to the farmers. And it's just a great relationship.

Mandelyn Royal:

Last season when I had my mama duck, Muscovy's and their ducklings, I was keeping them in. Tractors initially to keep everybody safe and sectioned off with their own space. And then I would let them out and right in front of my tractors, we had a very large tomato patch and the mama duck took all of her babies and they just ran through that patch of tomatoes and they plucked out all the small weeds, all of the bugs, and it was going fantastic. The tomato plants didn't get trampled at all. They didn't uproot any of them and it didn't become a problem until those tomatoes turned red.

Rip Stalvey:

I'll bet for off at that point.

John Gunterman:

Yeah. I also found limiting the access, like only letting them into the garden area, like twice a day in the morning, early bugs. And then in late afternoon, when the evening bugs start coming out. Otherwise, they get too aggressive and they start eating my plants that I want to eat.

Rip Stalvey:

Mandy, you touched on another reason to keep waterfowl and that's weeding. And there's businesses that rent out flocks of geese to weed fields. There's a breed that was almost extinct at one time here in the south called cotton patch geese.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh, I've heard good things about them.

Rip Stalvey:

They are fantastic. When I was at the museum, we had a small flock of those. And going through some of the historical accounts of cotton patch is that they, let's see, what was it? Four cotton patch geese could do the work of man, one man. Weeding the cotton in one day and they just turned them loose and kept them in there.

Mandelyn Royal:

Now I tried geese once because my husband was super sweet and he gifted me a pair of geese for Valentine's day, about five or six years ago, and they were perfect to me. And it was a pilgrim hen and a Chinese male. And that Chinese male would come up to me and he would let me hug him. And he was always trying to hang with me just as much as he hung with his mate. But the very moment my husband came outside, oh, it was war that, that Gander wanted nothing to do with him. And he told him every time he saw him. And then I let the female hatch out some eggs and we encountered some very mean offspring.

Rip Stalvey:

But

Mandelyn Royal:

that whole experience of having the geese. It makes me appreciate my Muscovy that much better. It's like the perfect combination between duck and goose.

Rip Stalvey:

Some breeds of geese are, have vile tempers. Especially during breeding season. Oh yeah. Sauropsis geese. You can't go around those things without a seriously heavy duty garden rake. When they're breeding Egyptian geese, they're some of the, some of those lines are pretty, pretty bad. I know Walt Leonard told me he had some that would, when they went after you, they'd fly up and go for your eyes, which is a little bit disconcerting. But yeah,

John Gunterman:

Dolls up here.

Rip Stalvey:

No.

John Gunterman:

The running joke, which is really, isn't a joke is the Canadians are so nice because they put all their hate in their geese and let their geese fly away. And we have them nesting all the time in the spring out in the fields when they're really wet and they are, they're vicious. They will go toe to toe with a combine. I

Rip Stalvey:

can believe it. They got

John Gunterman:

serious attitudes.

Mandelyn Royal:

Definitely worth noting that if. You're the type to keep your different species within the same flock space when you have a pair of geese. They can potentially be really damaging to your other birds once spring rolls around.

Rip Stalvey:

Yep.

Mandelyn Royal:

And they may not tolerate sharing their space if they're feeling a little bit nesty. And if you're trying to do the guard goose thing, the only way that really works is if you have just females and no male. And potentially just one, as soon as you have a flock of geese, they can not be beneficial anymore in a mixed flock setting. Just something to be aware of. If you hear about a guard goose, if you get a pair, they're going to guard each other and not much else, but they will tell you when UPS shows up at your house, they will tell you everything different outside and guard geese are very mindful of anything different. So when mine, I would let them just free range and I didn't try to force them onto my other birds and they were the first to tell us anything different, any strange vehicle, any strange person, any different dog, hawk flyovers, all of it. They told us all about it.

Rip Stalvey:

That's why I don't miss it. Don't miss a thing. And some of our listeners out there I know raise waterfowl to show that can be a big part of the hobby. They have some special requirements that you don't run into with chickens and all that. But there's some beautiful breeds of waterfowl. You see them in shows some of the Black East Indies Cayugas, which are also black. They just have, they're black, but they have that emerald sheen to them when they get out in the sun.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh yeah, Cayugas are beautiful.

Rip Stalvey:

Yes.

Mandelyn Royal:

The thighs and that green sheen.

Rip Stalvey:

The called ducks, and I'm going to go ahead and touch on this here. We have waterfowl are classed like ducks and geese, but They break the breeds. They don't have classes in the sense that they did or do in chickens. It's not a geographical class type. It's a size class. We have bantam ducks, which is the Black East Indies and the call ducks things like that. And then you have lightweight ducks, medium weight ducks, and heavyweight ducks. And that's where your Muscovies and your breeds like Pekins fall into those heavyweights. So that's helpful to know. But call ducks are They're really popular at shows, but I had some one time for about, oh, two, three days. That's an exaggeration, but those things are the noisiest little birds you can ever imagine. Oh

Mandelyn Royal:

yeah, they're very vocal, and there's almost two different types of call ducks from what I have gathered when I dabbled in them a little bit. Your exhibition type called ducks, the desired look is a very short and very round little beak. And then your more hatchery type of quality has a longer beak. And those tend to hatch easier than the exhibition ones, because that short, nubby little beak makes it tricky for them to get out of the egg.

Rip Stalvey:

That's something we can touch on later on, but waterfowl are like chickens, there's high quality exhibition lines and there's also that sort of mid quality ho hum everyday waterfowl. Here's an interesting thing. Some folks may not know how call ducks got their name. Madeline, do you have any idea?

Mandelyn Royal:

I don't. Call

Rip Stalvey:

ducks were bred, created in England to serve as live decoys for waterfowl hunters because they would call in the wild ducks and hence the name call ducks.

John Gunterman:

I spent many an hour sitting in a flat bottom boat in Brandywine Chute. Between Memphis and Arkansas waiting for ducks to fly by,

Rip Stalvey:

but that's literally why they're so noisy and it's more of the females that make all the racket than the males, but, oh

John Gunterman:

man, do you know of anybody still training them for that purpose?

Rip Stalvey:

No, I don't. I really don't. I don't even know. Most

Mandelyn Royal:

of our domestic varieties of ducks, they're mallard derived. And that's why a lot of them sound the same. And any of them that do the quack, that's a mallard derived type and the range of color that's possible in the domestic breeds from that. Almost single source. It's really neat. Like one of my favorite duck colors is the Saxony ducks. Those are gorgeous.

Rip Stalvey:

Like a sort of a whitewashed a little bit of a Mallard.

John Gunterman:

Hey Rip, I got a question. If we could loop back for a little second, cause you mentioned things like the Pekin duck and the Indian runner and some other ones that had, like the very specific geographic representation in their name. Is that because they were bred in that area? Yes, for

Rip Stalvey:

example, the Cayuga ducks were origin, they originated in Cayuga, New York.

John Gunterman:

And the Indian runners were somewhere on the Indian continent, maybe? Yes,

Rip Stalvey:

from India. But you can learn a little bit about where they came from. But there's no Conventional naming system out there for that would delineate where they came from or what their purpose was. It's just, whatever they decided to call them.

John Gunterman:

So these were wild waterfowl that somebody domesticated.

Rip Stalvey:

Yes. And ducks are classified, you don't run into it, it shows, but it's important if you're raising them to know whether you have diving ducks or puddle ducks.

John Gunterman:

We separate them by divers or dabblers.

Rip Stalvey:

Dabblers, same thing as puddle. Yeah,

John Gunterman:

if you see the tail in the air,

Rip Stalvey:

and

John Gunterman:

just the head under, they're a dabbler. They're a diver. You don't see anything for about two or three minutes. I remembered that I heard dabbler from wetland Ecology. I remembered that. Thank you Professor for, good for you. Yes.

Rip Stalvey:

That was just some useless trivia. I don't know why I got sidetracked on that. I apologize. I think it's

John Gunterman:

important to know,'cause you need to know where their food sources coming from. So like I watch the native waterfowl all the time. And, I'm out there with my binoculars and my siblings birds East, but different times of the year, I, by watching the pond and seeing what's living and growing, you can tell what they're eating and our job as keepers is to mimic nature as much as possible. So that could be useful information, or we could just be wasting our time with a pair of binoculars and a book, looking at ducks.

Rip Stalvey:

And now there's probably some people out there that are. have a question in their mind. Are there breeds that are particularly well suited for first time waterfowl keepers? And to me there are breeds like Cayuga's buff ducks, pecan ducks. They're fairly easy to keep and breed. But when you get into those call ducks, like Mandolin was alluding to earlier, they have really particular problems when it comes to reproducing. And all waterfowl, you can hatch them in an incubator, but it's a little more complicated process than letting the female hatch them. And especially it's much different than totally forgot my thought here. Sorry.

John Gunterman:

I was going to mention though, that my incubators have a. Waterfowl feature where they do that natural cooling down and extra watering cycles for you, which from what people have said, have greatly improved their hatch ability on their home bred eggs

Rip Stalvey:

does. And if people are used to hatching chickens, you realize that it takes longer to hatch. Waterfowl than it does chickens anywhere from about 26 and a half days to 35 days, depending on the breed.

John Gunterman:

With some very specific cooling cycles built in there, which is weird to me. And they require, yeah. That are very strange to me as well.

Rip Stalvey:

They have a higher humidity requirement and some breeds of waterfowl and call ducks are one of them. And geese seem to hatch better. If they are turned by hand and not mechanical turners, so that's something to consider going forward because that's you got to turn those things by hand about four times a day, four or five times a day to get good hatches. So it's something you have to babysit to raise those.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah, there was a learning curve to it when I was hatching and I ended up getting a separate incubator. Or staggering waterfowl, one batch chicken, another badge mixing them. Didn't work. So one or the other ended up shorted on something they needed. And then that of course reduced the hatch rate, but doing it in their own dedicated incubators so that you can simulate the cooling periods. And I kept a little spray bottle with distilled water in it so I could miss them when I closed the incubator again. It was a lot more involved to get those better hatch rates.

John Gunterman:

What kind of hatch rates did you end up realizing?

Mandelyn Royal:

If the eggs were super fresh and they didn't get too cold or too hot and they didn't get too filthy and I really babysat everything for the entire time, 90, 95, a hundred percent, but if I didn't do those things, I was lucky to get 20%. I brought in shipped eggs for Saxony ducks many years ago. And she sent 20 eggs and I got two chicks and that was not enough, or two ducklings rather. So then I turned around and ordered live babies from Halderon, which was one of the better hatcheries because they still paid attention to breed standard and whatnot. I was very sad to see that they had retired and a lot of their stock ended up going to Meyer, I think it was.

Rip Stalvey:

Another thing they're going to have to be dealing with is waterfowl's need of water.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yes, because that can have big impacts on your fertility rate too.

Rip Stalvey:

Absolutely. Some breeds absolutely, you can't get any fertility if they don't have water to breed in.

John Gunterman:

Just daily health. They have to be able to flush their sinuses. Yeah, that's the

Mandelyn Royal:

other thing. Their water drinker has to be deep enough that they can get their nostrils into it because they'll, When they go out and they dabble in all that mud will end up inside and they have to be able to wash it out.

Alex:

This concludes part one of Introduction to Waterfowl. We hope you'll join us next Tuesday as we finish up an Introduction To Waterfowl.

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John Gunterman

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Mandelyn Royal

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Rip Stalvey

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