Sunday, April 27, 2025
It was a culinary and historic disaster — bird flu striking the Crescent Duck Farm, the last duck farm on Long Island. Some 99,000 ducks, the farm’s entire flock, had to be euthanized at the beginning of the year because bird flu decimated it.
But last month came good news. More than 10,000 eggs had been saved, incubated off-site after being sanitized, and 3,700 ducklings hatched. These, Doug Corwin, president of Crescent Duck Farm said, could be the base — after two generations — from which to re-establish the farm’s volume.
Not only is Crescent Farm the last of what had been many duck farms on Long Island, but it has produced — and I think many would agree — the finest ducks to eat, certainly in the nation and probably in the world.
“Crescent Duck was started by Henry Corwin in 1908 in Aquebogue … on land that has been in our family since the middle 1600s,” its website states. Under the heading “Long Island Tradition,” it goes on: “The history of Long Island duckling began in early 1873 when a British resident of China, Major Ashley, obtained White Pekin ducks of unusual size, the eggs of which he later hatched.” From Connecticut, “a small supply (one drake and three ducks)” came to Long Island. “These four ducks are the ancestors of today’s Long Island ducks.”
They were Pekin ducks, named for Peking, China, now called Beijing. I’ve been to Beijing, and eaten in restaurants there that specialize in ducks. (A bit of duck history: Although they were named for Peking, they originated in Nanjing, the capital of China before Peking.) Crescent ducks, I’ve found, are far better than their antecedent ducks or other modern ducks. Duck meat can be stringy, but not Crescent ducks — ever. That has to do with a big change that took place in 1980, “a milestone year,” the Crescent Duck website explains.
It was then that Corwin, a graduate of the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, “began upgrading our breeding programs. Prior to this, birds were selected on farming traits such as good reproduction and growth. Douglas’ upgrade changed this process so that selections were directed toward breeding the meatiest and most succulent ducks.”
In an interview with Doug in better times, in 2016, he explained to me how he developed a breeding program resulting in more meaty ducks. Other duck farms produced “a very dry product, not succulent or moist,” he said. Leaving “plenty of skin fat” on Crescent ducks was his key to duck succulence. In my duck-eating experiences, there is nothing like the full breast meat of a Crescent duck.
I interviewed Doug after Crescent became the last Long Island duck farm. In 2015, the Chester Massey & Sons duck farm in Eastport closed.
The nemesis of Long Island duck farms was Suffolk’s first county executive, H. Lee Dennison. Waste that ran off from outdoor pens into creeks and bays was a major issue for Dennison. When I began as a journalist on Long Island in the early 1960s, Dennison continually criticized duck farms — concerned, early on, about nitrogen pollution in water bodies here. At Crescent Duck, however, as its website has noted,
“In the 1960s the farm was dramatically upgraded in order to meet environmental responsibilities.”
“We’ve spent a fortune,” Doug told me, on waste treatment. There are no outdoor pens; all ducks are indoors. And after treatment, discharges are at “drinking water standard.”
Doug is strongly pushing for federal approval for vaccination to prevent bird flu, emphasizing that “vaccines are available and are being used in Europe for avian flu. We must start allowing farmers this protection.”
A WNBC-TV piece on the Crescent Duck situation reported that vaccination is “something larger industrial (duck) farms oppose because of its impact on international sales.”
“Without our genetics” in the salvaged eggs, Doug had said, “we cannot survive.”
My wife and I were recently celebrating our birthdays, and there it was — duck, still on the menu. I asked the waiter if it was any longer Crescent duck, and he said that just a few days earlier, the restaurant had served the last of the Crescent duck it had. Now it was serving duck from a farm in Maine.
Sitting on Route 24 in Flanders is the ferrocement “Big Duck,” built in 1931 by Riverhead duck farmer Martin Mauer. Now Suffolk County-owned and on Southampton Town-owned land, it’s on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a U.S. landmark. With new generations of Crescent ducks, Long Island duck will be more than history.
Karl Grossman is an author, TV program host and professor of journalism at SUNY Old Westbury.
