Ducklings!

In spite of my policy of 'no more mouths to feed', my turkey hens surprised me but incubating a collection of duck eggs.  The two turkey hens did a great job sitting on the eggs and helping the baby chicks inside develop.  Do you know how long a hen must sit on duck eggs before the ducklings are ready to hatch?

Twenty eight days.

That is a long time to sit if you ask me.  When the first egg hatched, they were not excited to find a duckling.  Our Narragansett turkeys lay eggs with light brown spots so when I investigated their cache of eggs and noticed all the smooth white ones, I knew more ducklings were bound to hatch and I confiscated all of them.  Here are the turkey hens.

I put the eggs into our incubator making certain the temperature was set at about 101F degrees and that there was enough humidity which should be around 65%.  The humidity makes the eggs a bit easier to crack for the duckling.   It didn't take long for the ducklings to start emerging!  The hens had done the hard work of sitting on them and keeping them warm for son long. In the first twelve hours, four hatched.

They aren't pretty when they are coming out.  The duckling will be wet when he or she comes out and very tired.  It will spend time in the heated incubator drying off and resting before being moved to another box with a heat lamp to keep it warm, food, water and other ducklings.

I still had one more egg that was going to hatch.  You can see the first cracks in the egg in the picture below.  This little guy took a long time to come out.  After about 24 hours I became worried and did some research to try to determine if he was OK inside the egg.  It can take up to 48 hours for a chick to hatch but there is a way to 'see' if the chick is OK.  Can you guess what it is?

You carefully pick up the egg and hold it to your ear.  If they chick is doing well and trying to hatch, you'll hear the tap, tap, tap of it's beak against the shell.  I tried it and it was true!  I could hear this little guy tapping away.

I decided to video tape the final hatching and set up my video camera to wait.  

But I made the mistake of leaving to do an errand.  When I came back thirty minutes later, this is what I saw!

Just out of the egg!

And so cute just twelve hours later!

The little family of FIVE!