Call Duck: The Smallest Breed, and a Loud One

The Call is not an egg or a meat breed: Oklahoma State University’s breed register says it “is used primarily as a pet”. A Call weighs a kilo or less, lays a few dozen eggs a year, and can fly out of your garden whenever it likes. Metzer calls them ideal for “the hobbyist that wants beautiful and charming ducks but has little space”. The one thing to understand before buying is the reason for the name.

Call duck at a glance

The whole chart, with the note on how Metzer’s figures are collected, is on the breed comparison tool. The Call is one of the few breeds for which Metzer publishes no egg weight.

Where the Call duck came from

Metzer’s account: the exact origins are debatable, but the breed is believed to have been developed in the Netherlands in the 17th or 18th century, and was “initially bred to lure or ‘call’ wild ducks into traps or nets”. The British Waterfowl Association says the Call is “said to have been imported from Asia into Holland”, where it “seems to have suddenly become popular” around 1800. The idea was simple. Hunters used Calls, Metzer says, “to attract wild ducks closer, making it easier to catch wild waterfowl for food and sport” — Metzer notes that the small size and the loud quacking were what made the breed effective as a decoy. The Association says the breed was first standardised in the UK in 1865.

What a Call duck looks like

Small and compact. Metzer describes a petite, compact breed “much smaller” than standard ducks, and says Calls have historically been bred with short, wide heads and short bills; Oklahoma State University’s register describes a plump body on short legs. The British Waterfowl Association’s colours include Mallard, Blue Mallard, Silver, Black, Chocolate, Magpie and White, and the drake carries the curled tail feather. Male vs female ducks has the signs; the voice test works on a Call as on other mallard-derived breeds.

Metzer notes that, without straying from the APA guidelines, it breeds toward a “naturally shaped duck”, which it feels will make its Calls “more productive in terms of fertility, longevity and hatchability”. Its hatching instructions note that Call ducklings sometimes need help out of the shell because of their short necks and bills, and the 50% seasonal fertility on Metzer’s chart is the lowest figure on it.

Eggs

Twenty-five to fifty a year on Metzer’s chart — the lower figure without artificial light, the upper with lights giving 17 hours of light a day through lay — and 20–50 in the University of Kentucky’s table. This is not a laying breed: the British Waterfowl Association says Call ducks “are not great layers”. What the Call does well is sit: Metzer rates its mothering good, and the Association says the females are most likely to lay in clutches of 8–12 eggs and, if left to sit, “the duck will look after the resulting ducklings with great care and attention”. The broody duck guide covers what she needs. If you incubate Call eggs yourself, the hatch date calculator uses 28 days and says why that is an inference rather than a published figure.

Temperament and noise

Metzer scores the Call 1 on its temperament scale — as calm as the Muscovy and the Saxony — and describes a friendly, sociable duck that, like other breeds, can quickly form bonds with its owners and enjoy human interaction. Not every bird fits the description: one customer review on Metzer’s Call duck page describes a Call that was “very aggressive and frightened of us”.

And then the voice. The breed is named for its quack, which Metzer describes as livelier and higher-pitched than the quack of other breeds, and the British Waterfowl Association says the females “do have a very loud quack, which is why it would not be advisable to keep female Call Ducks if you have close neighbours”. Female Calls are the wrong ducks for anywhere with close neighbours. Why ducks quack explains what all that calling is for.

Keeping Call ducks

Two things make Calls different to keep. They fly — Metzer puts it in capitals — so the choice is a covered run or a clipped wing: for Mallards, Metzer’s FAQ gives a pen with a screened roof, or clipping the feathers on one wing, which “is temporary as the feathers will grow back”. And they are small enough for a hawk: eXtension warns that a hawk “may carry off a young or bantam bird and eat it elsewhere”, and that even well-fed domestic cats “will kill young birds”. A covered run solves both problems at once — against a persistent hawk or owl, eXtension calls it “the easiest way to protect your flock”. Duck predators covers the rest.

For feed, the feed calculator treats a Call as a mallard-sized bird. For space, Metzer recommends the breed to keepers with little space and the University of Kentucky says a smaller bantam breed “might be a good choice if you want to limit the space and feed required”, but the space calculator uses the same per-bird figures for every breed, by age. A Call still needs water deep enough to submerge its whole head, and the standard ration with enough niacin per what to feed ducks. Winter needs the same dry house and unfrozen water as for any duck: Metzer says that, like other breeds, Calls are “hardy and adaptable to various climates”.

Is the Call duck right for you?

Yes, if your neighbours are not close, you can cover the run, and you want a small, friendly, decorative duck that will sit on eggs. It is also a show bird: the British Waterfowl Association says the breed was first standardised in the UK in 1865 and that Calls “are now usually the largest entry at a show”. Choose something else if you want eggs in any quantity, if noise matters, or if you cannot cover the run — a Welsh Harlequin for a quieter, calm, laying bird, a Muscovy for one that is usually silent, a Pekin for a duck that stays on the ground. The beginner’s guide to duck breeds compares them, and the breed quiz takes two minutes.