assisted duck hatching...what was the brown stuff and smell?

[spish]

i have a bit of a bizarre situation here, 2 weeks ago one of my muscovys hatched out a nest of chicks..5 out of 10 eggs hatched.
the mother killed 4 of her babies and i took the remainder away before she killed that one too..
i never got rid of the old nest as momma seemed to like sitting on it, not like a broody would sit but she spent quite a bit of time on there!. however today i had a shock to see one of the eggs had nearly fully hatched (these should have hatched 2 weeks ago with the rest????!) but the nest was cold and so was baby so i brought it inside. it seemed to have given up and was all dried out. it made the most pathetic tiny squeek noise so i thought i had to give it a chance.

i dampened the rest of the shell (only the back end was still on but well and truley dried on) and started carefully peeling no blood or yolk so i took it all off. but around the duckys navel was a small sac (where you'd imagine the yolk sac to be) but it was brown/black and stank to high heavens (a death stink sort of smell)
i thought maybe ducky was dying and had maybe been stuck like that for a few days and the yolk had 'gone off?? but the sac thing fell off and ducky has since dried off and fluffed up!

any idea what the smelly thing was....and can ducky go and share a brooder with its 2 week old sibling??

 

[Sweetfolly]

Maybe it was an unabsorbed yolk that "went bad", but the ducky lived even without absorbing it...or maybe it was an underdeveloped dead twin! You know, like the egg was a double-yolker, but one of the embryos was a dud or quit very early on, so while one duckling developed normally, the other yolk rotted?

I think that the little one should be okay with its older sibling - just keep an eye on them at first, make sure the little one doesn't get picked on or squashed. I'm always adding tiny ducklings to the brooder with older ducklings, and usually the little ones are the bullies!

 

[spish]

well the little ducky is doing great with their older sibling )))))