Transcript
00:00:00
Hi friends this week we have a story about ducklings.
00:00:06
Towards the beginning of October, I found a surprise in the chicken coop. If you've been following the podcast for a while, you'll remember that we have had a lot of surprises in the chicken coop this year.
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This time, it was ducklings.
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We are talking about our eight surprise October ducklings and their habits, including their penchant for catching the zoomies as a group.
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We've had one of our Muscovy hands sitting on a nest in the chicken coop for weeks and weeks.
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I had been starting to wonder, as I usually do, if anything was going to hatch. I went to the barn to do chores in the afternoon as usual and noticed that the mom was off the nest and far away in the pasture, grazing with the other male ducks.
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Figuring she'd finally given up the nest as full of duds, I went in to check the nest over and clear out the eggs. To my extreme surprise, I heard Cheeping as soon as I walked into the coop. One of the eggs was pipped with a duckling inside, very much alive and calling for its mother.
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But the mother was gone.
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And I worried that since she had abandoned the nest while the babies were hatching, and since she hadn't raised babies before.
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Maybe she had gotten scared when the egg started hatching and left her post. This is dangerous because babies can get chilled easily when the nest is empty, and my confidence in this hen further decreased when I remembered that she hadn't yet successfully hatched or raised any babies.
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I didn't want to leave the eggs and take the chance. She wouldn't come back and I didn't know how long.
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She'd been gone, so I sprang into action.
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I gathered the chipping egg and held it close as I dashed back to the garage where I kept the incubator when we aren't using it.
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Ohh little baby. It's OK baby.
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I told it as I hurried along hearing.
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In response.
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From the look of the inner membrane, it had been drying out without the covering protection of its mother.
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That can also make it hard for a duckling to hatch the humidity during a hatch is very important.
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I walked into the garage and opened the cabinet with the incubator, fishing the contraption out one handed while I carried the hatching duckling in the other.
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I brought everything inside and quickly plugged the incubator in and set it up in the small half bathroom we have in our entryway.
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This is where I do my hatching these days. It has easy access to water, it's easy to close off from curious dogs, and it's close to the front door and the chick brooder that we keep in the garage for when the babies are done hatching.
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A plastic base for the incubator has channels for water, which helps you keep the humidity at appropriate levels, and you put a mesh covering over those waterways which forms the floor of the incubator.
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I set the hatching egg onto the mesh, poured in some water and covered the base with the incubator lid so that it could start heating up and generating humidity for the hatching duckling.
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Then I hurried back to the coop to gather the rest of the eggs and determine if anyone else was trying to hatch right now.
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There were nine other eggs for 10 total that I would need to carry back to the.
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House to check.
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I made a makeshift carrying pouch by holding the end of my T-shirt out and carefully nestling the eggs into the improvised sack.
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As I pulled them out of the nest in the coop and settled them into my shirt, I looked for pips or any other sign that the other eggs were hatching.
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But I saw no other Peps and heard no other demanding cheaps.
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Oh, maybe we'll only have one hatch. What a shame I said to myself as I walked back carrying my load of eggs and thinking about whether one of the local farm stores would still have babies. Ducklings do not do well when they're raised alone. They are very strong flock birds and need friends.
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I went into the house and set the clutch on a towel on.
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The table next.
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To the incubator, closing the bathroom door, I opened a drawer and pulled out my egg Candler.
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As we've discussed before, an egg Candler is a device you can use to shine a bright light into developing eggs to see if the baby inside is alive and well about to hatch. Or sometimes you'll see that the egg hasn't developed at all.
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I set the candle around the table, switched it on, and turned off the overhead bathroom light.
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One by one I placed each egg onto the holder over the light.
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To my shock, egg after egg after egg had a fully grown duckling in the hatching position. Bills pressed up against the egg shell, readying themselves to break through.
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Only one egg had not developed.
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I took the eight developed eggs and placed them into the incubator with their hatching sibling.
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Hatching ducklings will motivate one another when they hear their siblings working their way out and cheeping they also realize it is time to hatch and begin to work their own way out.
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And on and on and on until the Hatch is done.
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I encouraged them as I closed the lid. There you go, baby ducks. Come on out and hatch, I crooned.
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The PIP dad gave up.
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And the other eggs remained silent.
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I took the dead egg and threw it off the porch into the woods. If it had been in the nest with the others for five weeks, it was going to be extremely rotten and stinky, and I didn't want that anywhere near me when it exploded.
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If you haven't thrown a rotten egg before and I don't recommend it when they hit the ground or a tree or whatever, they make a sort of popping noise as they completely explode. At first you don't notice anything else, and then an overwhelming nauseating nose burning smell emerges.
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Feeling like it practically singes your nose hairs until you can get away.
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Once I had one egg left from a chick.
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Hatch and when I candled the egg, I couldn't tell if there was a baby in it that needed help.
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Or not.
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Since we were well past the Hatch date, I decided to try to open it a little bit to check.
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When I began to open a small pinprick of a hole to check the pressure inside the egg from the rotten contents took advantage of the vacuum created by the hole and blew apart in my face.
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I was covered in rotten.
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Egg. It went in my hair. It went on my hands. Friends. It went in my mouth.
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To this day, that remains one of the most disgusting. And yes, I admit, hilarious experiences I've had on the farm. I screamed when it happened, completely involuntarily. My husband came running and found me covered in the rotten egg spitting frantically into the sink.
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To try to get the taste.
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Out of.
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My mouth, he thought it was one of the funniest things he had seen, and for me I gained a deep weariness towards rotten eggs.
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At any rate, once I had safely disposed of the rotten egg from the most recent clutch, I settled in to wait and see how the Hatch would.
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Go October is late in the year for new babies, even under the best circumstances, and with their mom abandoning the nest, I wasn't sure whether our odds were really as good as they appeared from the candling.
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When the kids got home from school, I caught them up on all the excitement, showed them the pipped egg with the loudly cheaping duckling.
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And they talked to the eggs to give them some encouragement.
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Then they spun us into a whirlwind of activity to get the brooder in the garage ready for the babies. They were certain should be coming any moment.
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Our chick brooder is actually a long, deep watering through for large livestock.
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We've tried many different setups for raising freshly hatched baby chicks and ducklings, and so far this has been the best one. We have two different kinds of heating sources, usually a heat lamp with a warm red bulb that hangs over the brooder, and a heating plate which tries to simulate a mother hen.
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The plate is supported by adjustable lags, so you can raise it up or down depending on the age of the birds.
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It's warm underneath the heating plate, and it feels cozy. Chicks and ducklings like to get under there and it feels like their mom is with them.
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But they also like to jump on top and enjoy the gentle warmth that comes off of the top of the plate.
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These different heating options make it so that babies have choices and can stay warm when they move into the breeder and are most vulnerable.
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The incubator is very warm and humid during a hatch, and so you really want to keep them from getting cold and sick when you move them to their new home when they're out of their shell.
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The move to the breeder usually happens no sooner than 8 hours after baby hatches, usually longer. They need time to dry off, adjust to being out in the air and to learn to walk around.
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Their presence, as I mentioned, also motivates their siblings, who need that hatching encouragement from hearing someone else who made it out of their shell.
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The process works pretty well for all of them before they hatch. Chicks and ducklings absorb the rest of their yolk sack and that gives them enough food and water to go for at least two days without additional food or water.
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This is important because in nature, the mom has to sit on the eggs until they are done hatching. She can't get off to take care of just a couple of babies, so they have to be able to wait until she decides the Hatch is done and takes them to water and.
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Food. So our frantic rush to prepare the breeder was probably unnecessary. We only had one pipped egg and it wasn't anywhere near being done hatching, but it was good to be.
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Ready just the same.
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One of the things we really learned in this hatch is that muscovies take their time coming out of their eggs. The pipped egg didn't change much until the next morning when we could see some cracks running along the egg. It took until the afternoon of that day for the first baby to finally emerge, at which point I could tell that several other eggs were pipped and starting their own hatching process.
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We kept the first baby, who the kids dubbed Sunny in the incubator so that it wouldn't get lonely in the brooder by itself, and we waited impatiently for the rest to.
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Hatch in all, each egg took about two days.
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To finish hatching.
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We ended up with eight healthy ducklings, 2A dark brown all over 3A, pearly Gray, and three a sweet brown and yellow.
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We ended up moving them in pairs out to the brooder. It seemed like 2 would hatch around the same time and then the others would still be progressing. So the total hatch took at least four days for everybody to come out and get moved to the breeder.
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When we finally did get ducklings into the breeder, we would work with them to learn to eat and drink. You can do this multiple ways. We have found the most effective way for us is to dip their bills in the water and then play in the water a little bit with our fingers so they get curious and try to taste it themselves.
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With food, we find putting our finger in the food and sort of spraying it at them or kicking it at them with our finger works well. This is how mothers teach their babies. They spread the food all around and launch it at the baby, so they get curious and come eat it.
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This is a messy process, but it does.
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Work we already talked about how to.
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Terribly messy ducklings are in the wild ducklings. He smelled like pancakes. Story, so I'll spare you a lot of discussion on that topic, but suffice to say that once they were a few days old, we were working on acclimating them to the garden and the grass during the warm, sunny parts of the day so that they could make a mess outside.
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Their pen.
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What we found with this group of ducklings is when you put them somewhere new at first they would clump together along shuffling along the ground trying to determine if they were safe. Eventually one of the ducklings, usually sunny, would realize there was water for them to plan and a treat for them to eat, and would dabble their bill in the water.
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At that point, all the ducklings would become infected with a massive burst of excitement that gives them the zoomies. They all began running around, frantically slapping their little feet along the ground in a blur.
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They do this in the garden. They do this in their outdoor pen. They even do it when they get back in their brooder.
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My daughter Rory has dubbed this group the Zumi ducklings because they are so consistent about this behavior.
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The first time I took them into the garden, I also learned that in addition to Sonny's boldness as the oldest one of our Gray ducklings is very brave as well.
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The ducklings had finally settled down in the garden after getting over their anxiety about a new place, and then their zoomies when a few of our adolescent chicks we raised earlier in the summer wandered over, keeping curiously at the ducklings.
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At this point, the ducklings were just a couple of days old and very small, still able to fit in the palm of a hand.
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The chicks towered over them. Nearly full grown.
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I was a little worried the chicks would pick on the ducklings, but before I could intervene, one of our Gray ducklings charged forward and nipped one of the curious adolescent chicks on its beak.
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Startled and offended, the young rooster leaped backwards and stared at the duckling, who made a menacing hissing face at him.
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Adult muscovies can pull this off. They part their beaks and glare with a.
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Noise that tells other birds not to mess with them.
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This little baby duckling doing it looked positively ridiculous. A little grey puffball trying to scare off Godzilla, but as far as the rooster was concerned, his curiosity wasn't worth tangoing with a furious duckling.
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That was one of the strangest interactions I've seen in our birds, but I've had the opportunity to see it happen several times since then. Always the same Gray duckling, always fiercely warding off any chicken or duck it thinks might not be perfectly friendly to its siblings.
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It's now been a little over a month since this batch of ducklings hatched, and they are already almost as big as our adolescent chicks. No more sitting in the palm of our hands for them.
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It sometimes feels like muscovies double in size from day-to-day.
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They no longer fit comfortably in the brooder either.
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We recently moved their heat lamp out to a rolling pen in the yard and they spend their days grazing and enjoying the crisp fall weather.
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Soon they'll be big enough to range freely and move into the chicken coop with the rest.
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Of the flock.
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But for now, our zoomy ducklings are still babies for all that they are big babies, and we'll just hope the snow and really cold weather holds off until they are feathered out and ready to move in with the grown-ups.
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That's it for this week. Thanks for listening and I'll be back with another story soon.