Our Pekin Ducks

These are Pekin ducks.  They are the ones that people eat.  The dish is called Peking Duck, these are Pekin ducks.  They were originally bred out of China 3000 years ago, but these are American Pekin ducks, started in New England during the 1800’s.  They have the nickname of ‘Long Island Ducks’ because of its prevalence there.  

Someone saw our ducks get thrown out of the back of a pickup truck in March 2020.  We answered the call and brought the ducks in here.  We didn’t have duck food when they came so we gave them bird seed and cat food.  They really took to the cat food so now they get a sprinkle with every meal and it’s the first thing they aim for.  Ideally, we’ll be able to get them a kiddy pool to swim around in sometime soon.

Whoever had them before had them for about 8 months and they also decided to clip their wings.  They snip them the first few primary feathers to stop them from flying while they still can.  These ducks need to be well protected in an enclosure because if a predator ever came around, they’d have no way of escaping it. They are in fact, sitting ducks.

The males are a bit bigger and have a curl at the end of their tails.  We have two of them here.  The females are a little bit smaller.  Everyone looks pretty much the same though, so we don’t have names for them, they’re just ‘The Ducks’.  All of the girls started laying their eggs during the summer, so we’ve been getting 2-3 eggs a day.  Pekin ducks are very productive and have 150 eggs or more a year!