Muscovies for me!
I had chickens for 30 years, mostly for eggs. Problem is, I don't care for chicken meat.
Now, with a larger lot (but still in a city), I have muscovies. They make almost no noise, so I can keep a drake for breeding (as opposed to roosters!). They run in the shaded side yard under the fruit trees, so moving their bathing tubs (
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Black-Large-Concrete-Mixing-Tub-A-42/318924309#overlay) around to water the trees is useful. They are wood ducks, so don't need water to breed in. I grow greens for them to browse under the trees.
Muscovies can still fly: the wings have to be clipped yearly, like chickens.
I prefer their eggs - larger and more % of yolk for sunny side up on toast. The fat is supposed to be healthier for us than other fats (and tastes good). I harvest the drakes and older females, deboning all the meat to grind into sausage. If there is too much winter squash, grated squash goes into the sausage, too. Some of the fatty skin goes into the sausage, but most gets rendered into fat and chitlins. I like their meat so much better than beef.
Ducks are so much easier to fence than chickens: a 2' plastic fence on poles stuck in the ground will contain them.
Their drinking water is in 5 gallon food-grade buckets with a 6" hole in the top half of the side. The duck house shares a wall with the greenhouse. The buckets are in the greenhouse, next to holes in the wall. As the ducks get the water dirty with bits of their chicken feed, it gets dumped onto the greenhouse plants. So with this water near their food and two tubs in the trees, I only have to maintain their waters every few days for a dozen ducks.
The muscovies have a shorter egg season and lay less eggs than Khaki's, but they do lay plenty. Toward the end of summer the cleanest eggs go into 5-gallon buckets of lime water for "waterglassing". I end up with three buckets half full of eggs, which carries me through winter and early spring.
CONS: they just won't eat so many of the things I used to feed the chickens. Partly, their bills can't handle food that the chickens can tear into. I haven't been able to convince them to eat sunflower seeds, even if I shell them first. I grew some wheat, but they don't know to get the seeds out of the heads.
My ducks don't like squash bugs. I tried growing winter squash (with its healthy crop of bugs) next to the run, so that I could let the ducks in. In 15 minutes they had gnawed into three half-grown butternuts and eaten NO bugs! (I later read that squash bugs are related to stink bugs, but still!). And they ate any of the vines that grew through the fence into their run. (This year I will make trellises for the winter squash, since the bugs are so prolific.)
Maybe if I only fed them once a day instead of at-will, their hunger would encourage experimentation of more foods - but that would be too much work on my part. So despite muscovies' reputation for being good foragers, at least when compared to chickens I don't agree.
