Aylesbury Duck

A breed of domesticated duck bred mainly for its meat and appearance, a large duck with pure white plumage, a pink bill, orange legs and feet, an unusually large keel, and a horizontal stance with its body held parallel to the ground. Its precise origins are unclear, but raising white ducks became popular in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England in the eighteenth century to meet demand for white feathers used as quilt filler, and nineteenth-century selective breeding for size, shape and color produced the modern Aylesbury duck. Duck rearing became a major Aylesbury industry in the nineteenth century: fertilized eggs were brought into the town's "Duck End," where local residents reared the ducklings in their own homes, and the 1839 opening of a railway to Aylesbury enabled cheap, quick transport to London's markets, making the trade highly profitable. Competition following the 1873 introduction of the hardier, cheaper Pekin duck, combined with inbreeding and disease in the purebred Aylesbury strain and rising feed costs, pushed the industry into decline by the early twentieth century, a decline worsened by both world wars; by 1966 no duck breeding or rearing business of any size remained in the town itself, though a single surviving flock of pure Aylesbury ducks persists in the United Kingdom, the breed is critically endangered in the United States, and it remains a symbol of Aylesbury, appearing on the town's coat of arms and on the badge of Aylesbury United.