12th Annual BYC Easter Hatch-Along

[Corbdee]

Think like a duck!

Quack

 

[Corbdee]

@Corbdee I'm not hatching duck eggs this year but here's our ducks from the 2020 Easter HAL. Unfortunately they're rather unfriendly. These are the best picture I could grab this morning.

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They’re still very beautiful! Looks like Campbells. Correct?

 

[Corbdee]

Hi yall

I'm kinda new to BYC. My friend here coerced me to join this year's easter hatchalong heh. Ignore the names of the eggs. Got bored of numbering the eggs every time so I decided to give them random keywords. They're mallard derived, probably mutts. I've setted 6 eggs, on 10th of march. Bit early, but this was before I was made aware of this thread. This is my first time ever having any experience with ducks, let alone hatching them, so quite looking forwards to it!

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Welcome, and I hope the best for the eggs!

 

[Verna Y]

I expect to be seeing loads of pics

Will start uploading on Easter.

 

[Corbdee]

Thanks~ And yep. My friend been telling me to mist them about once per day. Set the humidity to around 30%. And keep eye on the size of the air cells, and readjust the conditions accordingly.

I've been rather lazy about researching things myself heh

Thats what BYC is for lol. I prefer to do the spraying/ cooling rather than without in my opinion

 

[Corbdee]

Will start uploading on Easter.

Same actually. I'll try to include a few pics here and there but the big amount of photos for me will flood in around Easter as well

 

[Corbdee]

I agree and don't mist turkey or chicken eggs. I do mist waterfowl with good results since my ducks would swim and wet the eggs every day and get better results when I do mist. I know that not everyone does this and that's cool too. When I don't, my hatch rates struggle as my personal environment is too dry, leading to the ducklings having a hard time getting out. Since it is her first time hatching ducks, I wanted to open the conversation as well as encourage her. No criticism meant either way.

Yeah I don't tend to mist anything other than waterfowl.

 

[Corbdee]

Not the best picture because there was too much light in the room but you can just see the question mark shape in the middle of the ring, that is the developing embryo.

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[Corbdee]

As weird as it sounds the hen can actually choose what sperm fertilizes the egg so typically whichever rooster is dominant will father the chicks in a flock even when there are multiple roosters but this is not 100% of the time. There can be interesting dynamics in multi-rooster flocks. Sometimes a dominant rooster or sometimes each roo will have "his" hens. Not sure how to answer your question but it takes about 24-26 hours to produce an egg so the egg she laid that day would still likely be from the first rooster and the egg the next day could be from either.

Interesting

 

[Corbdee]

I use the cool down cycle on my brinsea incubator. It does help!

There's a feature for that on a brinsea?! Which one?