Ducklings Abounding!
- Holly
- 22 hours ago
- 6 min read
Back in October, I did a blog post about Molly, one of our mallard call ducks, who sat on a clutch of 14 eggs and hatched out 7 ducklings. I also promised that I would do a future blog post updating what those ducklings look like grown up. So here is that promised post!
Australian Call Ducks
There are call ducks all over the world. They originally were bred to be decoys for hunting wild ducks - their loud, high-pitched quacks attracted the wild ducks into a trap or net. However, in this modern age they are mostly either kept as pets or bred for show purposes.
Australian call ducks are different from call ducks in other countries and are actually considered a different and distinct breed in their own right, developed independently from the rest of the world's call ducks.
Our Ducklings... And Their Mothers
As I said in that earlier blog post, in early September 2024, one of our ducks, named Molly, started sitting on a clutch of 14 eggs. Out of those, four weeks later, 7 ducklings hatched - 4 brown, 2 yellow with greyish bills, and 1 black (as pictured). Sadly, a few days later, two of them (a yellow one and a brown one) accidentally drowned when they were left in the water for too long. Ducklings' oil glands haven't started producing oil until they are fully feathered at about two months old, so they use oil that rubs off their mother to keep their fluff from becoming too waterlogged until they're old enough to supply their own oil. However, even mummy ducky's oil isn't enough to keep them from drowning if they are in the water for too long because they can't climb out.
Two and a half weeks later, Pebbles, another natural mallard mother (and one of Molly's daughters), hatched another 7 ducklings after incubating 13 eggs. This time there were 4 brown, 1 yellow with a greyish bill, and 2 black ducklings.
About this time, Molly decided that she wanted to sit on a second clutch of eggs, and started collecting up, and a couple weeks later incubating, 12 more eggs. Because of this, she wasn't doing a very good job of looking after her 5 remaining babies, so we put them with Pebbles and her 7 new ducklings for a total of 12 ducklings for her to look after.
Three weeks later, Bubbles, a white call duck, hatched 9 brown ducklings out of the 10 eggs she had incubated. Also about this time, Pebbles decided she wanted to follow her mother's example and sit on a second clutch of eggs, so the 12 ducklings she'd been looking after were left to look after themselves (they seemed quite capable of that by this time)!
On the 2nd December 2024, just less than 9 weeks after her first batch of ducklings hatched, Molly's second clutch hatched - 6 ducklings out of 12 incubated eggs.
Three weeks later, Pebbles' second batch of ducklings also hatched - 3 brown and 3 yellow with brownish bills!
Now all those ducklings have grown up and are fully feathered, and we've even already sold some of them! We had a total of 36 ducklings this year (hatched from 61 incubated eggs), with only 3 fatalities (two drowned and one died in the shell as it was hatching). That is a hatch rate of 59% - pretty good!
Duck Colours and Sexes
Usually you can only find out the sex of a duck when they're about 6 to 8 weeks old, when their voices start to change from those cute little chirps to squeaky quacks or rasps (which mature as they get older). Ducks (females) quack, whereas drakes (males) make a more raspy sound - I've heard it likened to the way Donald Duck talks. It is possible to physically find the sex of the duckling younger than 6 weeks - at risk of injuring the duckling if you don't know what you're doing.
However, there is a way to safely tell the sex of a duckling from the moment they're hatched - did you know that when certain duck colours are bred together, you can know what sex each duckling is by its colour? I am not a geneticist, so I can't explain all the whys and wherefores, but it is most fascinating - and true!
We had bought a new drake which was a different colour at the end of the 2023-2024 breeding season, so we didn't know what colours would result from breeding him with our girls. In my last blog post about the ducklings, I said that the father of Molly's ducklings was a chocolate mallard, but I have since learned that he's actually a chocolate silver. We used this same drake (his name is Rocky) with all the mothers - Molly, Pebbles, and Bubbles.
Our Duck Colours This Season
In both Molly's first and second batches of ducklings and Pebbles' first batch of ducklings, there was a total of 5 black ducklings (natural mallards), which are all boys. All the different Australian call duck colours originate from natural mallard call ducks, which look like this:
Between all the duckling clutches this season, there was a total of 20 brown ducklings (excluding the one that drowned) - otherwise known as chocolate mallards. All the chocolate ducklings hatched from Molly and Pebbles were girls (again, that fascinating genetic link between colour and sex!), but only five of Bubbles' brown babies were girls, the other four (obviously!) being boys.
The reason I specifically mentioned "yellow duckling with greyish bill" (which actually was yellow with a greyish hue all over, including legs) and "yellow duckling with brownish bill" (which again was brownish all over) is because they not only had those characteristics, but each of those turned out to be two different colours!
There was a total of 3 "yellow ducklings with greyish bills" (excluding the one that drowned), and they turned out to be silver mallard drakes. I don't have a photo of a silver girl because we've never had one.
The "yellow ducklings with brownish bills", of which there are 5, are chocolate silvers like daddy duck - all of them are girls.
Previous Seasons
When we first got call ducks in 2020, we bred Molly with Fritzie, a white call drake. This produced some different colours than what we got here this season with Molly and Rocky.
We've had lots of white call ducks over the years:
One of the different colours we've had in the past is blue mallard. We've only ever had drakes of this colour.
Another colour we've had is lilac mallard. We've only ever had one girl lilac, which we sold.
I love ducks, especially these mallard call ducks with all their interesting colour variations! We'll try breeding different colour combinations this upcoming breeding season, and hopefully we'll get yet more interesting and different colours. I'm not a duck expert, I only give information according to the best of my knowledge - but it's still fun!
Comments