A is for Aylesbury Ducks

I have joined the A-Z challenge, which means I will be posting daily short pieces, which follow the alphabet, and other members of the challenge will hopefully visit the blog and comment on it!

At the same time, I hope many of them – you – will be adding your links to your spare, which is a networking page for anyone about anything.  Plug done!

As I’ve just hatched some chicks – see the pictures here – it occurred to me that I might follow a theme – as per the teams suggestions – and am starting off with the idea of choosing different breeds of poultry to talk about.

I may digress at some point, and also add some of these posts on my crafts blog julzcrafts.com, so when there isn’t a daily post here about chickens or poultry, there will hopefully be one on a related subject, or not related, smile, there.

(Addendum:  In fact I emailed the organisers to ask if this was OK, and actually they can’t track me if I do that, but I think a compromise would be – to reblog this first post to julzcrafts.com, and as the cut off point for the challenge is to miss 5 days, switch over to that site for a few days during the month – lets see if it works!)

 Aylesbury Ducks

were big business in the 18th and 19th century and most of them were reared in  – guess where  – yes you got it – Aylesbury! (Buckinghamshire, UK).  They used to walk the ducks, yes they all walked, sometimes with little leather shoes on their feet, to London, to market, where they were slaughtered and sold for a good profit.  (A bit like the way cattle were taken to the railways in the cowboy days of the USA)

Wikipedia says “By the 1950s only one significant flock of

Prize-winning Aylesbury duck (front) and drake (rear), 1873

Aylesbury ducks remained in Buckinghamshire, and by 1966 there were no duck-breeding or -rearing businesses of any size remaining in Aylesbury itself. Although there is only one surviving flock of pure Aylesbury ducks in the United Kingdom and the breed is critically endangered in the United States, the Aylesbury duck remains a symbol of the town of Aylesbury, and appears on the coat of arms of Aylesbury and on the club badge of Aylesbury United.”

However, there has been some sort of revival of Aylesbury Ducks in the last few years, I think I bought some eggs a few years ago from a breeder, and they were a commercial cross with the old Aylesbury’s and the more quickly reared Pekin Ducks.

The eggs hatched, the ducks grew, I couldn’t face killing them to eat, and sadly, the fox got them.  I haven’t tried rearing them again!