#dabbling duck

THE DUCKLING SAGA

I have a neighbor with a few chickens and ducks, she doesn’t know much about poultry but she’s very enthusiastic.

I know nothing about ducks.

She wants a couple of ducklings, and asked if she could add a couple of eggs to my incubator. She doesn’t understand stasis, so every time her ducks would lay an egg, she’d wrap it in a paper towel jump into her golf cart and rush it up to me to put it in an incubator – before it got cold. 

Over time I ended up with 5 or 6 eggs.

Initially, the eggs were green with duck written on the side in sharpie. The first one wasn’t fertilized. The second died early on, the next was mostly developed then gorked. It wasn’t looking good plus I had to keep moving the eggs, which isn’t ideal, as they aren’t on the same hatching cycle as chicken eggs.

One day my neighbor brought me a brown egg, labeled duck and I dutifully add it to the eggs going into an incubator. Since I didn’t know how may ducks she has, or which breeds, I figured another duck had started laying. Well today the brown egg hatched and I was all excited for her, except – it’s a chicken!

Maybe the funniest part of this is that she doesn’t have a rooster.

She’d borrowed one of my Silkie roosters back in early April when she wanted  chicks. Her chicken hens had just started laying, for the first time. I kept saying the we’d need to keep the rooster and hens together for a month or longer before collecting the eggs, but she was super excited and brought me the first eggs the the hen laid after the rooster arrived. When I candled them after 10 days in the incubator, none of them were fertilized.

This chicken egg that finally hatched came to me nearly 2 weeks after she returned the rooster to me. I knew that chickens can reserve (also reject) sperm from different roosters for a few weeks, so this was the end of that range.

We had a good laugh over the chicken. I still had two duck eggs in the incubator, but hey seemed to be timing out, and one I was pretty sure one was dead.

On Wednesday, I was cleaning out the incubator, getting ready for the trash man’s arrival when I heard a faint cheeping from inside one of the duck eggs. I stood with the egg in my ear for a long time to make sure I was actually hearing what I was hearing. I was.

I didn’t say anything to my neighbor. I didn’t want to get her excited in case the duckling didn’t survive hatching.

I put the egg under a broody hen and waited. 24 hours later, I peeked under the hen, nothing. No change. Damn.

This morning, voilá, webbed feet, tiny little bill, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.

How cute is this little guy?