We had lilac Muscovies a few years back - beautiful. We started with Alice and Lachy and soon had loads of ducklings, as the ducks are good mothers. Once the lads reached the age of gang bangs they went into the freezer. The young ones love to swim, but the drakes are less keen as they get older.
The youngsters can fly well, but ours didn't tend to fly off. Alice and all her daughters however could fly very well. If she was being chased by a drake she would fly towards a fence, then lift over it at the very last minute - the drake would crash into the fence and the duck would go on her merry way - all very deliberate.
The ducks however did fly over the boundary fences and hedges, something our hens never do. A couple of them laid clutches away - we didn't see them again. They can't be all that bright because although they would fly to get out, they would want to walk back and couldn't work out how to get through the fence.
They would fly up onto our barn roof (it's a single storey) then down into our flower garden - grr!
The most hilarious thing was watching the drakes getting into the veggie garden. It was surrounded by 2 metre windbreak mesh and they used their claws to climb steadily to the top then belly flop down to the ground. The ducks just flew over.
The ducks fly well enough to do a circuit 20' above the ground, but the drakes soon become too heavy.
Ours were trained to be herded into bed at night. They never went in on their own but would let us guide them with two long canes held to either side of the group.
One night half a dozen young drakes refused to go to bed, so they ended up staying out all night. Next morning there were half a dozen mangled corpses festooned across the pastures.
They fetch a fair amount in the sales if you're lucky.
In the end we got fed up with the endless gang bangs and all the c3@p wherever we stood, so we sold them off in trios and ate the rest of the drakes. We do miss them though - wonderful characters.
