11/30/11

Recently (March 2010), I purchased eight Call ducks for herding, from Joyce Norris in Waltonville, Illinois.  Joyce has some of the nicest herding ducks in the midwest, and supplies them for various herding trials and clinics at Purina Farms west of St. Louis, as well as at other events around the area.  Joyce also conducts herding clinics and private instruction in herding, specializing in duck herding.

My dogs Meg and Kate have had a great time herding these nice little ducks, and we got them just in time to brush up on our duck herding skills before going to some duck trials this spring.  Meg finished her AKC Advanced Ducks title this month, and Kate has earned two legs toward her AKC Started Ducks title.

Call ducks originated in the Netherlands, where they were used as living decoys to attract other breeds of ducks to ponds and waterways for hunters.  The little bantam sized Call ducks made good hunting decoys because the females are rather noisy and quack loudly, so that other ducks can hear them and be attracted downward as they fly over, from far above.

Notwithstanding the somewhat dark purpose for which they were bred, they make excellent herding ducks and are easy keepers because of their small size.  They are also sweet natured and very comical in the ways that they move and talk.  You cannot help but smile whenever you look at them!

Here at Bellwether Farm, we keep them in a pen in the barn at night, and during the day we let them out to roam in one of the smaller pastures along with the sheep.  It has turned out that they do not respect the interior fences very well, and since they are rather small (about 1.5 pounds each) they tend to simply walk right under gates, or right between the gate and the gatepost to get wherever they like.  However, at night they are eager to go back into their safe pen in the barn, and if I am not there to open the gates to the barn, they will hang around somewhere near the barn, waiting to be let in.

As with our geese and chickens, the ducks are somewhat protected from predators (owls, hawks, opossums, raccoons, etc.) by the fact that they live together with the sheep.  The sheep do not do anything in particular to protect them, but I think it is just their presence as larger animals, which deters those predator birds and small mammals that would otherwise swoop right in to prey on the ducks.  It may not be a perfect solution to predation, but it works pretty well most of the time.  In two years of keeping chickens, geese and ducks, not a single bird has been lost, although the farm is on the edge of a deep woods.

The Call duck females lay a light blue egg about the size of a medium chicken egg.  I gather eggs each morning (which they always lay in a nest within their night pen).  They are laying 2 - 3 eggs per day, from the group of four females.  Our border collies get the hardboiled eggs on top of their kibble once a day, as a delicious treat!

These eight ducks (four females and four males) are paired up into four monogamous couples.  I do not know whether all Call ducks mate monogamously such as these do, and I got the impression from talking to Joyce Norris, that they do not.  However, I think it is charming that they are matched up in this way, and I'm glad those are the ones that I ended up with!  The four males are all silver with dark teal heads, like larger mallard ducks.  The females are all light (three are white, and one is a light cream-khaki color).