More than EGGS
The history of the duck is as varied as the many different breeds.
In the beginning, there was the Mallard. Wild Mallards range throughout temperate and subtropical North America, Europe, Asia and South Africa, and they have for thousands of years. As John H. Robinson explains in his book, Our Domestic Birds: Elementary Lessons in Aviculture (1913), unlike other wild ducks, “The Mallard takes very readily to domestication. Although in the wild state it is a migratory bird, in domestication it soon becomes too heavy to fly. After a few generations in domestication, it loses its power of flight and cannot be distinguished from stock that has been domesticated for centuries.” All modern breeds around the world, except for the South American Muscovy, are descendants of wild Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos).
Specifics about duck domestication are spotty. We know the Chinese farmed domestic ducks during the early Han Dynasty (206
B.C. to A.D. 220), but based on clay figurines unearthed in China, ducks might have been domesticated as early as 3000 B.C. Historians agree that Southeast Asians domesticated Mallards in many separate locations. That didn’t occur in the West until much later.
Roman agricultural author Columella
(A.D. 4-70) penned one of the earliest references to tame ducks when he described building a “nessotrophion” or duckery in his famous work, “De Re Rustica.” He says, “When any one is desirous of establishing a Duckery, it is a very old mode to collect the eggs of the above mentioned birds (such as Teal and Mallard) and to place them under common hens. For the young thus hatched and reared, cast off their wild tempers, and undoubtedly breed when confined in menageries.”
The flesh of ducks wasn’t, however, esteemed by the Romans and is hardly mentioned in ancient Greek literature. In fact, Europeans disregarded domestic duck meat and duck eggs in general. There was no Scandinavian word for domestic duck prior to the 16th century, and domestic ducks are hardly mentioned in manorial accounts kept anywhere in Europe prior to the 1500s. An exception occurs in the medieval court rolls of Elmley Castle in Worcestershire, England, where they are mentioned as a public nuisance because they swam in a river that provided the castle’s water supply.
Wild ducks were another matter. Waterfowl trappers captured them in huge funnel nets to the extent that a closed season was set in 1534. Waterfowlers in Holland and in the Fenlands of eastern England used live tame ducks as decoys to lure wild ducks to their nets as early as the 1400s. Trappers, and later shooters, needed small, easily transported ducks with loud clear voices to attract prey. Dutch breeders developed cute, petite and noisy Call ducks for just that purpose.
Domestic ducks begin appearing in European art during the 17th century. Crested ducks feature prominently in “The Poultry Yard,” a painting by Dutch artist Jan Steen in 1660. Melchior d’hondecoeter painted crested Hookbills, and Johannes Spruyt painted pied and magpiecolored Dutch ducks during the same time frame.
In Britain, domestic ducks weren’t known by breed or type names until the late 1600s. They were simply called common ducks. By the 1700s, breeds began emerging with the development of the English White, a type that became today’s Aylesbury. Of them, said the Rev. Richard St. John Priest in 1813, “Ducks form a material article at market from Aylesbury and places adjacent: they are white, and as it seems of an early breed: they are bred and brought up by poor people, and sent to London by the weekly carriers.”
French farmers in Normandy raised Mallardcolored meat ducks for hundreds of years before exporting Rouens to Britain and, later, the United States.
The first British National Poultry Show took place at the Zoological Gardens in London in 1845. Fanciers exhibited four standardized breeds: Aylesbury, Rouen, Black East Indian (now called East Indies) and Call.
Some historical accounts say the 13th Earl of Derby imported Britain’s first Runner ducks from Indonesia in 1835; others say a sea captain brought them from Malaysia around 1850.