NATURAL
AND
ARTIFICIAL
DUCK CULTURE
JAMES RANKIN
Price 50 Cents.
FIFTH EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED
SOUTH EASTON, MASS.
1906
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1906, by
JAMES RANKIN,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
DESIGNED AND COMPILED BY
H. A. SUMMERS
BOSTON, MASS.
BIRDS-EYE VIEW MAPLEWOOD FARM. JAMES RANKIN,PROPRIETOR.
INTRODUCTION.
Our original motive in publishing this little book, was one ofself-defense, to relieve ourselves, in a measure, of a correspondencewhich was becoming much too large for the time at our disposal. Afterreading from fifty to one hundred letters per day, from people, askingall manner of questions concerning the hatching, growing and marketingof ducks, in detail, there were not hours enough in the twenty-four toanswer them. This book was published to send out with our machines tomeet these queries and give our patrons our method of growing, supposingit would cover all the points in duck-culture, but it does not as yetanswer the ends. The questions still come in far beyond our ability toanswer, and as our fourth edition is about exhausted, we now publish afifth, revised, enlarged and illustrated; also adding a Question Bureau,which will answer many of the questions which have reached us during thepast few years concerning the growing, as well as the diseases to whichthe Pekin duck is subject. Though we have been in this business fornearly forty years, and have been eminently successful, we do not claimto know all about it; but by persistent effort, careful selection andbreeding, have succeeded in developing a mammoth strain of Pekin ducks,which, for symmetry, precocity and fecundity (experts who have visitedour place from all parts of the country tell us), stand unrivalled onthis continent.
Many of our customers write us that their birds average from 150 to 165eggs per season. We would say that there is no domestic bird under soperfect control, so free from diseases of all kinds, or from insectparasites as the Pekin duck. From the time the little bird is hatched[Pg 5]until it is full grown and ready to reproduce its own species, it isunder the perfect control of the intelligent operator, who can producefeathers, flesh or bone at will, and even mature the bird and compel itto lay at four-and-a-half months old. There is no bird in existence thatwill respond to kind treatment, generous care and feed as the Pekinduck. On the other hand, there is no bird more susceptible to improperfeed or neglect, and a sad mortality is sure to follow among the littleones, where proper food and system are wanting. It may surprise some oneto know that the predisposition to disease may exist in the egg fromwhich the little bird is hatched, or even in the condition of the parentbird which produces the egg. Strong physique in animal life, as in man,are like exotics, requiring the most assiduous care and cultivation, andare the most difficult to transmit.
Defects, like weeds, seem indigenous to the soil and will reproduce withunerring regularity, and will often crop out in all directions,gene