Silver Appleyard

Amazing!We just picked up our ducklings from the post office…five Appleyards and 15 Welsh Harlequins. All are doing great. We can’t wait for our chick order to come in!

Probably not purebredThese ducks are only for backyard enthusiasts who want a dual purpose duck that resembles the Silver Appleyard breed.

I am a homesteader so my primary purpose is meat and eggs. However, I specifically purchased the Silver Appleyards hoping to start a conservation flock of this heritage breed.

I ordered 10 chicks - 6 female, 4 males. The males were banded. One unbanded duck was DOA. A second unbanded chick was weak and didn't make it through the night. The remaining 8 chicks were healthy and grew quickly with no surprises in gender, so we have 4 drakes and 4 hens. They are almost 12 weeks old and we're going to be having a duck feast for Christmas.

The bad news is that my ducks appear to come from a contaminated blood line because 3 of my 4 hens have dark bills, which is unallowable in Silver Appleyards and suggests they were possibly crossed with Welsh Harlequin at some point. The ducks are also on the small side for SAs. The remaining hen with a correct bill color is a dark phase (black chick grows up to have mallard colors) which is an automatic cull for preservationists and show breeders. None of my drakes check off enough boxes on the breed standard to qualify as Silver Appleyards. One of them is colored like a female so I thought it was a fat hen until it started rasping at me.

Bottom line:

I've seen SA ducks in the past from McMurray and other hatcheries supplied by Metzer, so I knewI knew they would be flawed coming, but I've never seen them this bad. I expected at least one reasonable pair to come out of the group so that I could start a homestead quality conservation flock, but the ducks don't even look like Silver Appleyards. Since this purchase, I found a Silver Appleyard group on a social networking platform and I've met some serious breeders who are preserving the Silver Appleyard standards. I will be purchasing from them in the spring. If you want real SA ducks, I recommend you do the same./