Keeping Ducks and Geese

A Practical Guide

Debbie Kingsley

• Publisher: The Crowood Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781785009624
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Animal Husbandry
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Full of information and practical advice, this book is suitable for those thinking about keeping ducks and geese, those who have recently become duck and goose keepers and want to learn more, and for the more experienced keeper. With over 290 photographs, this book provides everything you need to know, including: legal requirements; land, fencing, housing, equipment and security. There is a comprehensive list, with accompanying photographs, of over eighty duck and goose breeds. Information is available to help decide what breeds will suit you best and acquiring your first birds. Further topics covered include: feeding and nutrition; health and welfare; breeding and rearing; raising for meat, slaughter, plucking and preparation for cooking, plus recipes.

CHAPTER ONE

Us and Them: Their Place in Our Lives and Culture

There’s a small corner in our seventeenth-century farmyard that has two tumbledown pigsties, and the area in front of it is – and was – known as the goose yard. It’s nothing special, just a small contained area close to the house, where any kitchen peelings and scraps could be thrown to the geese and the pigs housed just behind. It was probably an area of rich smells and prodigious muck in more pragmatic times, when the expectation was that you fed your kitchen leftovers to the livestock. The corollary is that the transfer of diseases through imported foodstuffs was rather less likely in those days than it is now: four hundred years ago they spent their time worrying about flea-infested rats importing bubonic plague instead.

A bird’s eye view.

The goose yard.

George Ayre checking a sitting mother goose, Ashwell, Dolton, April 1974. Documentary photo: James Ravilious/Beaford Archive

Ashwell, Dolton, January 1977. Documentary photo: James Ravilious/Beaford Archive

My favourite photographer, James Ravilious, who documented life in rural North Devon over a twenty-year period starting in the early 1970s, captured farm scenes that can seem hundreds of years old, rather than fifty. There is a reassuring timelessness about the interactions between humans and birds, and the ducks and geese portrayed could be from the 1820s or the 2020s. Some of the more ramshackle housing and fencing arrangements that he pictured can still be seen today, but it’s clear that even though there might not have been the money or time to spend on providing fancy bird accommodation (keeping birds was primarily for the table, whether for one’s own pot or for sale to others), the ducks and geese portrayed are themselves clearly in fine fettle, plump and well cared for.

DOMESTICATION

Both ducks and geese were domesticated during the Neolithic period, about five thousand years ago, and as wild species were found in all parts of the world except for the Antarctic. The Greylag, Egyptian and Asian Swan geese are the ancestors of all our domestic geese, while domestic ducks are descended from the Mallard (originating in South Asia) and the Muscovy (from South America), with all but the domesticated Muscovy owing their parentage to the wild Mallard. Geese were first kept by the Egyptians, and in South Asia the domestication and farming of ducks spread widely across the world – which is hardly surprising since the birds were easy and cheap to keep, and had so much to offer, from fat to feather, quills and down, as well as their eggs and the exceptional quality of their meat.

Mallard female and male.

Greylag goose.

The active farming and economic value of waterfowl is reflected in the annual Goose Fairs still held in Tavistock (held in October) and Nottingham (held in October or the end of September); these fairs date back to the early twelfth century when farmers brought their geese ready for purchasers to do the final fattening for Christmas. Hundreds of geese would be driven on foot from their farms to the fairs, their feet dipped in warm tar and sand to protect them on the journey, while the feet of some were bundled into leather shoes.

Birds were certainly a desirable commodity, though it’s not certain whether the local archive has so many records of people prosecuted for stealing a duck in the eighteenth century because they were starving, or because the birds had an attractive resale value.

THEIR PLACE IN OUR CULTURE

Wild ducks and geese always stir the imagination when they fly high overhead in formation, their skeins pointing the way forwards, the laggards suggesting just how far they’ve travelled from their breeding grounds, reminding us of different lands and people. Ducks and geese appear in the art of cultures across the world from at least 1500bc – for example they are depicted on decorative ware made in Europe in the late Bronze Age and Iron Age. They are the subject of ribaldry, nursery rhymes, folk tales, pantomime, songs, fables, cartoons and games, and are shown (mostly dead, and draped on sumptuously laid banquet tables) in lavish still-life paintings celebrating material pleasures and the ephemeral nature of life.

They make an impact on our language, too, even in the most urban environment, the goose in particular featuring in all sorts of common idioms from ‘wet goose’ for someone without gumption, ‘wild goose chase’ (a pointless exercise), to ‘what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’ (reciprocity), and ‘having a gander’ (taking a look) – while the duck has ‘water off a duck’s back’ (having no effect), ‘sitting duck’ (easy target), and the even simpler ‘ducking’, meaning to avoid something at head height, or plunging someone under water in jest or as punishment. People whose only contact with waterfowl comes from throwing them a bagful of crusts in the park will still probably know that ‘goosing’ someone means grabbing or pinching them on the buttocks – although ‘goosing’ can mean a more generic and less physical poking or invigorating, for example of financial markets.

Ducks and geese are honoured in place names, such as Goosey in Berkshire, Polgooth (goose pool) in Cornwall, Goose Green in Pembrokeshire, Goose Craig and Goose Isle, both in Kirkcudbrightshire, while there are plenty of Duck Streets and Duck Lanes in the UK. Both birds are well represented in pub names too: The Duck Inn, The Ginger Goose, The Dog and Duck, The Fox and Goose, The Drunken Duck, The Greedy Goose, and more.

In our local village there’s an annual duck race where children use rods to catch a barrage of plastic ducks sent racing down a stream that cuts through a local farm.

Geese have been used as sport for hunting since prehistoric times, and their hunting has given rise to a form of folk art: the creation of the decoy. Antique and contemporary decoys can be sold for many thousands of pounds (and dollars – they are very popular in America). Many decoy carvers are also hunters, and the craft continues today.

Of course, a critical part of any culture is its food, and the extra effort made in its preparation at times of celebration. The feast of St Michael and All Angels is traditionally celebrated as Michaelmas on 29 September by feasting on a ‘green’ goose (see below), which augured prosperity for the coming year. Michaelmas was the first day of the farming year, and if a landlord was lucky, their tenants might gift them a goose when paying their quarterly rent. A green goose is the leaner, younger goose that was traditionally fed almost entirely on grass, stubble and harvest gleanings, as opposed to the fatter Christmas goose, which would have been finished three months later on a wheat diet, and its desirable fat reserves built up as the weather cooled.

PETS

In the thirty years that we’ve kept ducks and geese there has been a definite move away from small-scale keepers who saw domestic waterfowl solely as providers of meat and eggs. In times past, many will have had an older, non-productive bird kept on in a retired capacity, seen as an old friend who could teach the youngsters how things worked – but the majority of the flock was kept as a delicious contribution to the table. This practice does, of course, continue, but there are increasing numbers of duck and goose keepers who regard their birds as pets, a sign of more affluent times, and reflective of a culture where it is no longer expected that you have to rear your own food to assuage hunger. We may be able to source every possible type of foodstuff from a shop these days, but the yearning for getting back to nature is ever strong, and enjoying the company and shenanigans of ducks and geese can be a fulfilling part of achieving that.

Mallards in the house.

CHAPTER TWO

Why Keep Ducks and Geese?

Unless you are entirely driven by commerc...