6 Miniature Appleyard eggs - advice welcome

[Holonomic]

Hi all,

We have been wanting to welcome some ducks into our family for quite a while now, but last week we took the plunge and managed to find some miniature apple yard hatching eggs. Which is the breed I decided we would get a few years back, the plan was to get them last year but due to us getting ready to welcome our daughter into the world we thought it would be best to wait
Although she is still too young to help clean the duck house we hope she will enjoy growing up with them in the garden

The 6 eggs were placed in the incubator last Friday, 6 days ago. We candled them for the first time this evening and unfortunately it looks like 2 are not viable - I have attached a picture of one of the two below and would appreciate confirmation. (also added a fertile egg as an example)

not fertile? ​	Fertile

Our plan was to have a small flock, we have the room for a larger flock but I don't think we would want more than 8-9 preferably with only the one drake, obviously we can not control what we have sex wise but from the 4 (potentially) viable eggs we are now looking at 2/2 unless we are lucky and get 3 females and 1 male... or unlucky and get more drake
I had planned on either selling or giving the drakes away to help control the flock size/excess drakes. I would have been OK with the idea of keeping them as table birds but my partner is not.


Although I have many questions which I am sure I will bother you guys with soon enough, for now I would like to ask how we should proceed.

• Could you confirm that the above egg (on the left) is 100% not fertile or should we wait longer?
• If it is not fertile I assume we should remove it from the incubator and pop them both in the bin?
• If we get 2 hens and 2 drakes, I assume we should still remove one of the drakes?
• How would you suggest building the flock up from (hypothetically) 2 hens and 1 drake? should we wait a year and line breed them and try again next year or should we get more hatching eggs this year? Are there any downsides of getting them this year vs waiting and breeding our own?
• If we did get more hatching eggs for this season/year, should we wait until these 4 hatch before incubating the next 6 eggs or could we add another 6 to the 4 now? Again and advantages/disadvantages of either option?

I believe that is all for now, I hope you are all well and have a good weekend.

//Quack

 

[Isaac 0]

The second picture isn't showing it for me.

 

[Holonomic]

How about now?

 

[Isaac 0]

Hi all,

We have been wanting to welcome some ducks into our family for quite a while now, but last week we took the plunge and managed to find some miniature apple yard hatching eggs. Which is the breed I decided we would get a few years back, the plan was to get them last year but due to us getting ready to welcome our daughter into the world we thought it would be best to wait
Although she is still too young to help clean the duck house we hope she will enjoy growing up with them in the garden

The 6 eggs were placed in the incubator last Friday, 6 days ago. We candled them for the first time this evening and unfortunately it looks like 2 are not viable - I have attached a picture of one of the two below and would appreciate confirmation. (also added a fertile egg as an example)

View attachment 2082215​	View attachment 2082418
not fertile? ​	Fertile

Our plan was to have a small flock, we have the room for a larger flock but I don't think we would want more than 8-9 preferably with only the one drake, obviously we can not control what we have sex wise but from the 4 (potentially) viable eggs we are now looking at 2/2 unless we are lucky and get 3 females and 1 male... or unlucky and get more drake
I had planned on either selling or giving the drakes away to help control the flock size/excess drakes. I would have been OK with the idea of keeping them as table birds but my partner is not.


Although I have many questions which I am sure I will bother you guys with soon enough, for now I would like to ask how we should proceed.

• Could you confirm that the above egg (on the left) is 100% not fertile or should we wait longer?
• If it is not fertile I assume we should remove it from the incubator and pop them both in the bin?
• If we get 2 hens and 2 drakes, I assume we should still remove one of the drakes?
• How would you suggest building the flock up from (hypothetically) 2 hens and 1 drake? should we wait a year and line breed them and try again next year or should we get more hatching eggs this year? Are there any downsides of getting them this year vs waiting and breeding our own?
• If we did get more hatching eggs for this season/year, should we wait until these 4 hatch before incubating the next 6 eggs or could we add another 6 to the 4 now? Again and advantages/disadvantages of either option?

I believe that is all for now, I hope you are all well and have a good weekend.

//Quack

The picture is showing now. The egg on the left is unfertile, and can be tossed into the trash.If you get a 50/50 ratio you'll more then likely have to sell one of the males or get more females.I'd wait a few months before you start setting their eggs, just because new layers eggs can sometimes be funky, soft shelled, weirdly shaped is common and might affect your hatch rate.If you have another incubator you can most definitely set more hatching eggs, It's just recommended not to mix eggs that are in a different development stage, since they require different temperature/humidity.

 

[Holonomic]

Thank you for the reply.

I was not planning on using their eggs to incubate this year but rather next year... or I could purchase another 6 this year.

Would it be better for the flock to be born in the same year or for them to be 'staggered'? Unfortunately I do not have a second incubator so I would need to wait another ~22 days in order to start the incubation process with another 6.

Assuming the same success rate and a 50/50 split to hens and drakes I would have a flock of 5, 4 hens and 1 drake. Leaving 3 drakes to rehome.
I am just not sure if I should do this now or next year, would a flock of 2 hens and 1 drake be too small? 4+1 seems ideal to me, hopefully slightly larger depending on how lucky we are

To be honest we probably should have purchased adult ducks to get the flock we want, but we really wanted to start the journey from eggs

 

[Isaac 0]

Age difference won't matter, It's just the work that is sometimes involved with integrating young birds to older birds.You'll just have to wait and see, ratio partly depends on each drakes personality and your setup, a good guideline to go by though, is around one drake per five hens. Cute kid!

 

[Miss Lydia]

I have 4 to 1 in my Muscovy and it's working but like @MasterOfClucker said it all depends on the drake. My Runners it's 2 to 9.

 

[Holonomic]

Ok so I think we have come to a decision (sort of) on this. We will not be getting another 6 hatching eggs until the ones we currently have are hatched.
If we get lucky and get a 3:1 ratio we may just leave it for this year and use our own eggs to hopefully increase the size of the flock to 6:1.

That depends on us being able to sex the chicks early, if we are unable to do so or we have more drakes than hens we shall be buying another 6 hatching eggs this year to ensure we have the right ratio for when breeding season starts. This should avoid us needing the remove the drake from the 'flock'.

 

[Miss Lydia]

You can also buy sexed from a hatchery too. Which helps if wanting to only add females to an already existing flock with a drake.

 

[Holonomic]

Absolutely, unfortunately there are no breeders local to us that breed these ducks (we want to keep to the one breed for now).
I think that would have been the ideal solution to the problem however.