Last spring I bought two Campbell Khaki ducklings and put them in with my small flock of laying hens of several different breeds. They proved to be a pair and it was cute to watch their courtship and mating as they grew up. During the winter, an owl invaded the pen and killed the hen duck. At first the drake grieved so hard he would barely eat, but as this spring came on, his natural instincts reasserted themselves. He began to go after the hens, preferring the dark-colored ones that most resembled his mate. And he has been getting them, too! Exactly the same way he did his wife, except that they would not get into the small tub of water provided for him. I have photos to prove this. The only way they can escape him is by going into the coop where he will not follow. So far, no harm has been done that I can see, but I am wondering whether it's time to put this drake into the oven. For various reasons I don't wish to obtain more ducks.

There's some federal lawstuff going on with Muscovy you need to be aware of if you're going to get into raising them for profit. The government outlawed raising Muscovy without realizing how many domestic Muscovy breeders there really are. It sounds like it will work out but for right now, it's actually illegal to have Muscovy in captivity, as crazy as that sounds. This is brand new, like just a few months ago. Anyway, thought you should know. I agree, raising ducks would be far more profitable per pound, especially free ranged on pasture, since they are such good bug eaters. The food is more expensive (higher protein) and I think the little chicks are a little harder to raise, messier and require more bedding. But, with the right set-up and market, the profit margin should be there. There is not much profit margin in chickens. They eat a lot more than you can make, even free-ranged, jumbo-cross organic meat butchered at 6-8 weed. Feed cost is really high right now, too. The best profit margin I've ever had in poultry, crazy as it sounds, was when I sold peafowl and guinea chicks. Free ranged the adults, collected and incubated eggs and sold tons of chicks during the spring and summer. They were very popular where I used to live, in SW OK, for some reason. I'm sure ducklings would have done well too, and when I move back to the country, I plan to add some duck varieties to my little hatchery plan.

Was Dr. Carolyn a mutation from Galinas? Would that be considered a sport? I don't have Carolyn's book in front of me, but I think both are in there??? ***** I saved seed from Galina's Yellow and the next year when I sowed those seeds I got plants with salmon, pink, yellow, red and ivory fruits and all the plants were RL. Galina is PL. The ivory colroed one was far and away the best both in terms of taste and plant vigor, and I saved those seeds and wrote mutant on the vial. To this day I have no idea what kind of muation it could have been. A sport can refer to a mutation of the DNA in the seed or to a mutation in the cell of a plant, which are called somatic mutations. When a somatic mutation occurs one can have one wrong colored fruit on a plant with all correct colored fruits, and it was a somatic mutation that led to Yellow Riesentraube. Also with a port ( somatic) mutation one can find one branch with differently colored fruits or a branch with altered shape of fruits. I've had two somatic mutations of that type. At the same time a good friend in Utah, Steve Draper, had had the same thing happen and asked if I'd send him all my different colored ones. I did, and he also thought the ivory one was the best. Without telling me he listed it in the SSE Yearbook as Dr. Carolyn and was I ever surprised. It has some of the genes from Galina's which almost everyone says is a great cherry variety, and I agree. (IS there a definition of Heirloom out there?) There are several definitions of heirloom out there but no one accepted definition. Carolyn

I used to have a good friend who had ducks for his children to play with and learn from and I ended up with many of the surplus eggs. The eggshells were extra hard and were an attractive pale green to blue. I used some for Easter eggs one year. I often used them for fried eggs. They tasted like eggs. It has been at least 15 years but as I recall, the yolk was more orange and stood up more than the large chicken eggs I was normally using then. Many of them were extra extra large. I don't recall any unusual response when I used them for bread baking. My next door neighbor and a more distant acquaintance have chickens and I sometimes get their eggs. The neighbor's eggs appear almost identical to store eggs, but some of the distant chickens must be different because the shells are extra hard and large like the duck eggs. They all act like eggs.