Pekin

Description

The Pekin or White Pekin is an American breed of domestic duck, raised primarily for meat. It is large and solidly built. Pekins are calm and extremely friendly, probably one of the friendliest of all duck breeds. Their docile temperament makes them an ideal breed for pets. Despite being one of the heaviest duck breeds, Pekins are quite active and are very good foragers. Pekins are also very hardy. They can live in nearly any climate with few problems. They’re resilient and don’t get sick easily. They lay around 200 eggs a year.

Use

The Pekin is raised almost exclusively for meat. In North America, more than half of all ducks raised for slaughter are of this breed. The birds are large-framed, hardy and fast-growing. They have a high feed conversion ratio, are calm-tempered and fertile, and their eggs have a high rate of hatchability. The white feathers make the carcass easy to clean after being plucked. Pekin meat is fattier than that of chickens or Muscovy ducks. It has lighter flesh and a milder flavor than Muscovy, but it’s still considered dark meat.

They are not good sitters, and eggs may need to be artificially incubated. Pekins are famously bad broodies and mothers. They rarely, if ever, go broody and sit on their eggs. Occasional individuals will sit, but even those may be undependable mothers. If you want to hatch Pekin ducklings, you may need an incubator or a broody of a different breed.

Showing

Weight: Drake: 4.1 Kg, Duck: 3.6 Kg.

Pekins have yellow-orange bills and orange shanks and feet. Their bills may also have black speckles or splotches, although this is a fault in exhibition birds.

Their plumage is white. In addition, their feathers are extremely fluffy and bushy, more like down than the tight waterproof sheath other ducks often have. This makes Pekins look bigger and chubbier than they actually are.

The beak is yellow,fairly short, and almost straight.

When it comes to conformation, big is the name of the game. Pekins have a long, broad body, a thick neck, and a large, rounded head. They have a wide, full breast. They are solidly built and have a rectangular body shape from a side view. Their body carriage is 35 to 45 degrees above horizontal, and they have an upturned rump and tail. They are around 20 inches (51 cm) tall.

Pekins don’t come in any other color varieties, only white. Ducklings are bright yellow.

The Pekin entered the British Poultry Standards in 1901 and the American Standard of Perfection in 1874.

History

The mallard was domesticated in China some 3000 years ago, and possibly much earlier. Force-feeding of ducks is documented from the tenth century, under the Five Dynasties.  The Chinese were sophisticated breeders of ducks,among several breeds they created was one named shi-chin-ya-tze (十斤鴨子), which roughly translates to "ten-pound duck", from which the American Pekin derives.

In 1872, James E. Palmer of Stonington, Connecticut, loaded fifteen white ducks of this type for shipment to a businessman named McGrath in the United States. The birds were loaded at Shanghai but had been hatched in Beijing. Nine of them – six hens and three drakes – survived the voyage, which took 124 days and reached New York City on 13 March 1873. Five of the surviving birds were dispatched to McGrath but were eaten before they reached him. Palmer's four birds became the foundation stock of the American Pekin; by July 1873, his three hens had laid more than three hundred eggs.

 It was soon in widespread production for slaughter.  Until that time the duck most commonly raised for meat had been the Cayuga, which had the disadvantage of dark feathering, so that any fluff remaining on the carcass was easily seen; the white-feathered Pekin was preferable.

Other birds of the same type were imported to the United Kingdom in 1872 and from there soon reached Germany, where they gave rise to the German Pekin, a distinct and separate breed. In Germany, the Chinese ducks were cross-bred with upright white ducks brought from Japan by Dutch ships, resulting in birds with a steep body angle; those taken to the United States were crossed with birds of the British Aylesbury breed, which led to birds with a more horizontal stance. The Pekin in the United Kingdom derives from birds imported from Germany from about 1970.