I have two drakes and five ducks and no ducklings!!! There are fertile eggs in the nest and no one sitting on them. I am starting to get impatient. I have gone beyond wanting purebreds and am even prepared to hatch mongrels. Just so long as they are ducklings!!!
2 comments:
Hi Lucy C - There are a couple of things you can do. Firstly, all the eggs you have in the nest, put a mark on them, like a big red "X" in crayon or something. Then every morning, with each fresh egg that is laid, start numbering them "1" for day 1, and then "2" for day two etc. You only want your girls to sit on about 12 - 18 eggs, so you need to know which ones to toss out so that when they do finally sit, they are only sitting on eggs less than 2 weeks old. As you number the fresh eggs, you can start chucking out the old eggs, starting with the ones with a cross.
The thing that "triggers" a duck to start sitting is sight. Suddenly, Mrs Duck will look at a big pile of eggs, and something in side her will register - "oh, theres enough eggs, I can start sitting now", so, most people collect the eggs each day, numbering them as above (or putting the date on them) and then when they think their Mrs Duck is getting close to sitting, they put all the eggs back in the nest at once, hopeing to trigger the "oh, theres enough eggs now" thing. For my Mrs Duck, she needs to actually see about 18 eggs in there, and she doesnt sit untill December. It may be that it is just too early in the season for your ducks.
YOu can tell when your duck is getting close to sitting, suddenly she will try and make the nest really big, and perhaps even start lining it with her chest feathers, although for my girls, this doesnt happen until she is actually sitting tight. She will start spending more time on or near the nest and become a bit "ratty" and noisy in her behaviour.
If you are always making sure there are only the freshest 12 - 20 or so eggs in there, then you can leave it to nature and she can just sit when she wants to. You can always remove some of the older eggs once she is sitting tightly and only getting off one a day to eat/drink.
The biggest mistake folks make is to leave ALL the eggs there accumulating, and then when she does sit, there are too many to keep warm and you have no way of knowing which ones are old, and likely to explode. This strategy almost always leads to disapointment - as with a number of ducks, there will always be too many eggs laid before someone is ready to sit. This is because many of our domestic breeds of ducks are bred for EGG laying, which means their bodies lay heaps more eggs than they could ever hope to sit on, and far more than the regulation 12 or so eggs that they would lay in the wild before they sit.
HOpe some of this might be helpful!
Regards to your flock! (or bevy)
duckie
OH, I forgot to mention, that with my Mrs Duck, when I put the dozen or so eggs back into the nest, sometime in December, every year, it takes about 7 days for her to finally sit on them, and during that 7 days, she continues to lay, so for each egg she lays, I remove the oldest egg in the nest.
Hope that helps
Post a Comment