Too much rain for me -but the ducks are loving it
This year's 12 gosling have now all grown up. All but 4 have gone to new homes.
Video is for grandson Joe who took to the largest African gander.
Merry Christmas from the Czechs - from a snowy Christmas past.
Some of this year's Silver ( Harlequin ) Indian Runners at 8 weeks and, no , that video is not speeded up. They really eat that fast. To stop them choking, the pellets are fed in water. I'll have to train them to eat like everyone else when they have finished growing up! A lot of drakes this year unfortunately in these md/md, lih/lih with brown. Females look brown, the males are split for brown/not brown.
Two goslings from the RBST Pilgrim project, with a white Czech male.
The grey female Pilgrim has sex-linked dilution (Sd), so her wild colour grey is only part diluted. Her brother (in the centre) has two doses of dilution and appears almost white. Neither bird has white spotting (sp) because this has been selected out of the strain over several generations. In the UK, crossing Pilgrims with white birds, such as the Czech in the foreground, has resulted in cross breeds which lose their auto-sexing characteristic. True Pilgrim males are solid pattern (Sp+) and must have a touch of grey in the wing feathers, plus some diluted grey feathers on the back and rump. White spotting (sp), in combination with (Sd), turns birds white, like this Czech.
Capital letters denote dominance; + denotes wild colour.
Shetland Goslings
In 2013, we got a pair of French Normandy goslings – auto-sexing geese with the same colour pattern as the West of England and Shetland. The birds we hatched from that pair confirmed they were reliably autosexing. The Normandy geese were eventually crossed with Shetland geese (which were in very short supply) and their auto-sexing characteristics and colour pattern were maintained. These offspring were healthier that than their Normandy and Shetland parents.
In 2021 we also bought a pair of Shetlands from Green Tree Farm Shetlands in Yorkshire. At 2 days old, like other auto-sexing breeds, the gosling female down is a shade darker grey than the male, and the beak colour is also darker. By the time these 2022 goslings are feathered at 8 weeks, the male will have lost the obvious grey saddleback/white spotting pattern and be almost white.
In the fluff, the pattern is almost the same in white Czech goslings. It’s just darker in the Shetlands in the video. Thus the pattern of white-spotting (leaving a grey saddleback) remains the same. This was explained in an article published in Liz Wright’s Smallholder Magazine (Kelsey) Nov/Dec 2021.
Zoe Warner’s recent shots from Bali – the origin of some of J W Walton’s Indian Runners in 1909.
Letter to Walton: ‘I have sent you 14 ducks. Six of them I received a month ago from Mr Kalff, the assistant Resident of Mataram, for you. The rest I bought here but they were imported from Bali so that there is more chance of them not having been so much crossed. One of them has a top knot which may be of interest to you. Ducks with top-knots are fairly common here . . . I selected the most erect ducks I could find’.
Of the Bali ducks bought by Pownall, two were white and one white duck had a black tail. The latter was used with a Black East Indian to produce Black Runners eventually.
Zoe’s recent shots from Bali also include pied ‘American’ Fawn&White Runners i.e. pied with two blue genes, making them apricot.
Information from: ‘The Indian Runner Duck - a historical guide’ https://www.ashtonwaterfowl.net/indian_runner_book.htm
![A new duck book from Australia is now availableProduced by Andy Flett, the title is: fifty: [re] collectionscelebrating...](https://img3.voofla.com/182/606/142921391826067.jpg)
