Bad Egg or mistake?

[Delicatessy]

I am currently incubating about two dozen duck eggs I received from shipping. I checked them out for the first time 14 days into incubation and saw one egg with patches of dark area visible through the egg shell. I cracked it open and out came a developing chick. Now, I want to know if I possibly killed the chick or it was probably dead already. First time incubating shipped eggs and second time incubating anything.

 

[Aphrael]

Hard to say for sure without actually seeing it myself, but those dark patches were likely the developing embryo in the egg. You could look up day 14 embryo development and see if yours matches it pretty closely or not.

 

[Delicatessy]

When I say patches, I mean like jeans patched up. Uniform in one part and then something just pops out as you as weird. Not the dark outline of the embryo when candling (I tried that on a couple of eggs and saw movement in those). They were irregular shaped and seemed to have edges and corners. And there were multiple patches on that egg while all the others looked normal. Also sometimes when I open the incubator there is a bad smell which dissipates in seconds. I tried to find an offending egg but could not single one out with the sniff test, so I thought the patchy egg was the bad one and cracked it open in a ziplock bag.

 

[Aphrael]

Hmmm. That does sound very strange. Maybe it was some kind of bacteria growing in there. When you cracked it open, did you see anything that might account for the patches?

 

[Delicatessy]

Nope, but this is the first time I have done something like this so I don't have the experienced eye to tell if something is wrong or not. I would rather lose one egg than two dozen.

 

[Aphrael]

I hear ya on that.

 

[gdawg2752]

This happened to me several times with my duck eggs and it does not effect their hatching. I have had many duck eggs with these dark patches that still hatched without any birth defects. Your Welcome!

 

[Orca5094]

If it was still alive when you cracked the egg open, you would've seen it moving at least a little bit. Did you see any movement from it at all? Sounds like it was an egg going bad, so I think you did the right thing.

 

[Delicatessy]

If it was still alive when you cracked the egg open, you would've seen it moving at least a little bit. Did you see any movement from it at all? Sounds like it was an egg going bad, so I think you did the right thing.

No, but I did an awful job cracking it open too
Guess I will never know exactly. Better get more experience.