The “straight run” of most every place that sells chicks, ducklings, and goslings are the “leftover” birds after the sexed chicks have been separated out for sale. Due to the aggressive and overbearing nature of male birds (roosters and drakes) and their inability to lay eggs, they often make up the majority of the birds left behind after the selling off of the egg-laying female birds.

After having witnessed the sheer aggression of my own male Indian Runner Ducks especially during the spring season when their hormones apparently get to surging to prepare for mating season, I can attest that too many male birds in your flock means you’ll be dealing with more injuries to your birds due to territorial disputes for limited available female mates.

Birds will literally attempt to eliminate the competition for your female birds if the imbalance is great enough.

It has been easy enough to break up these spats when they start getting a little too heated by throwing water on the ducks or walking up to them. This is only because my Indian Runner Ducks are not aggressive towards humans and instead choose to flee whenever anyone gets to close, ending whatever battle they were currently involved in.

The larger issue is that the drakes have also been taking out this male aggression on my singular female duck, the only girl duck that came in my order of “straight run” ducklings.

While she has not been seriously injured by my drakes, male birds have been known to pluck and peck out the eyes of female ducks who refuse to mate with them or mate with other drakes instead of them.

Unfortunately, I am quite fond of all of my ducks and instead of culling the aggressive males for dinner, as some people do, I will be adding more female ducks this spring to hopefully give every male duck a mate and reduce the amount of horniness and aggression in them. Of course, this time, I will be paying extra for sexed female ducklings to make sure that my flock will be balanced this time around.

The smaller duck is the girl and the larger one is one of my male ducks. After running into a hard object, this duck injured his beak which seems to have made him more aggressive as he’s been fighting several times a day ever since. In order to give him the chance to properly heal and not get an infection and perish, he’s been locked up at night away from the other male ducks.

They may look super adorable running away from their duck mom at full speed, but these little birds are 80% feathers and 20% hate. They wrestle each other, locking necks, pulling at each other’s feathers. I have even seen them grab each other’s throats in their bills. Do not be fooled by their cuteness! Having too many drakes will bring discord and violence to your food forest flock.