Testing complete!
Good news…it held temperature! So I carefully marked x and o and a number or letter on the eggs I’ve been saving and loaded them in.
Meet hopefully a future flock of mostly ducks!
27 blue runner eggs (left side), 2 Sermama chicken eggs in middle, and 15 duck eggs from a mixed flock of buff and roeuns.
Stay tuned, I will be candling them in a few days!
Just got done setting up a new incubator. It has been a long time since I hatched anything, although when I did I did hundreds between ducks and quail!
I’ll be putting blue runner duck eggs, one tiny serama chicken egg (that’s all they’ve given me so far) , and filling the rest of the space with buff/Rouen mixed eggs. 28 days of waiting ahead of me!
But for now, I watch the temperature attempt to stabilize itself….
I somehow missed this post back then the ducks were hatching! Better late than never 🙂
I had one duck in an egg that just took his sweeet little time hatching. Problem was, the moms were stomping his egg and he wasn’t ready (note the bright red membranes). So I brought him in to keep an eye on him, using the heat from the brooder heat on him.
First coming in after I cleaned off the broken shell pieces:
A better look at him (no, I didn’t peel anything extra, this was the damage from the moms stomping him). I used some liquid coconut oil to moisten the edges of the shell where the membrances were to stop him from getting “shrinkwrapped” (membranes dry and trap the baby). Then I placed him in a small 1 quart cup with damp paper towels underneath and put him in the brooder directly under the light.
He stayed like this for 24 hours!
Caveat…always give them enough time to come out on their own. 24 hours seemed forever for this guy to just be sitting in the shell, but that’s how long it took before the veins in the shell membrane were gone! Had I tried to get him out too early, he would have probably died from blood loss. Make the conditions as good as you can and then wait…
Then…I looked over and he decided he’d had enough and gave a HUGE kick and tada!!! Freedom! I didn’t even have time to get a picture…
However, he wasn’t done yet since the umbilical cord area had not closed up (barely visible here).
I changed the paper towels and removed all the shell/membrane pieces and gave him some freshly dampened paper towels to lay on. I also placed a small amount of triple antibiotic ointment on the open naval area.
He stayed in the cup for another 12 hours until he was dry and the navel dried. The puppy pads were about to be changed in this picture…ducks are messy!
Once dry, a final inspection (including a sniff from Rudy, who never cared about baby birds oddly) and he was added to the group.
A few hours later…Can you tell which one he is? He ended up blending right in and had no issues!
What to do when there are multiple hens sitting on a big nest?
Well, one thing is to candle the pile of eggs to reduce the number so the remaining ones have a chance at survival…I found that the hens kept rolling eggs around to have their own batch and some were ending up outside the nest.
I bought a rechargeable LED candler on Amazon for under $20 and decided to try it out. Below are two examples, one is a fertile growing egg and the other is a broken egg (not visible until candled).
This is a broken egg. It looks like it either rolled against something hard or got pecked by a beak. If the egg was almost done developing, I’d leave it as the break is only shell level and not into the membrane. But since it’s shell level and the nest is overwhelmed, it was added to the pig food bucket.
This is a fertile and growing egg. Notice the embryo in the middle with blood vessels radiating outward-all is going well!
All of the eggs that candled at this stage were marked and given back to the ducks. Advice: Remove the hen off the nest before trying this or you will probably get a bunch of pinch bites! I only candled after I was certain the hens were staying on the nest so they didn’t abandon it, about a week after I noticed they only came off for food and water.
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