Baby Ducks Keep Dying

[AlanAndLouAnn]

My wife has been incubating and hatching Call Ducks for years in a styrofoam incubator...and had great success until now...for some reason, she hatched about 30 ducks eggs and put them in a brooding pen having a few hatch each day...She has 2 males and 7 females adults laying the eggs...they eat and drink very little and did not grow properly, stayed small, even spoon fed water, and still 24 of them died within a week or so...Out of 30 eggs, 6 lived...she even got niacin last week to add with food thinking it might help..Yes, the tempeture in both incubator and brooding pen are correct...and using starter food...any ideas what might be going wrong???

 

[BirdsBeesTrees]

It's a hard question to answer. I had a little call duck that wasn't progressing and was small, I realized that it couldn't poop very well. Twice a day I would clean its bottom. Now although it is behind the rest of the ducks it is thriving! It's tail was down so I couldn't tell at first what the problem was. I feed my ducks/turkeys/peafowl and sometimes chicks a high protein gamebird starter. One time when we were raising pheasants we unknowingly fed some feed that was bad and it killed a bunch of them. I hope you find the answers you are looking for...