Photos added. The Welsh Harlequins are a couple of my own birds.

Group Captain Leslie Bonnet was born in 1902 and died just up the road from from where I live, in Cricciet, fairly recently back 1985. He was an RAF officer, short-story writer and famously in the poultry world, he was a duck-breeder. Although, he was best known as being the creator of the Welsh Harlequin Duck, the only true Welsh duck breed. This was in 1949.

What is not so well known, is that he also went on to create a second breed, namely the Whalesbury Duck. The Whalesbury enjoyed some popularity but this quickly waned and I think that I'm correct in saying that few if any actually still exist today.

However, all is not lost. In his excellent book, 'Practical Duck Keeping', which he wrote in 1960, he details exactly how he created his second breed of duck. ( I have a first edition ).

The Whalesbury was created by crossing a Welsh Harlequin Drake to Aylesbury females.

He then discarded the parent stock and bred on only from their off spring. I would imagine that best practice would have been to obtain the original Aylesbury stock from at least two different sources, there by being able to avoid inbreeding. This would have made it quite easy be able to keep a new line of Whalesbury's going.

I think this would be a nice project for someone who wanted to keep something a bit different and who had a a bit of time on their hands. The breed does sound as though it was a fairly useful dual purpose breed to keep

PS. I always seem to have some surplus Welsh harlequin drakes on my hands.

This little not that busy fb group that I run has been going for a few years now. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1706228472806637?locale=en_GB