Da' Cute and Cuddly Call Duck thread!

[Starkasm]

Last night I checked the incubator and one of the eggs was leaking. A crack in shipping that I missed? Wasn't any signs there had ever been life. So I try to get it out of there. It's dried where it leaked and stuck....I try wetting it, pulling it gently, prying it....it broke....omg!! I don't think in my entire life I've ever smelled anything so horrid! And I've changed poopy diapers
Cleaned it all up and out of there but talk about yuck. Next time I will do a better job candling them!!

But I actually do have a question and I hope this is the place. When I got the eggs some of them were so tiny that I didn't have much hope for them. Well some of those are veined and looking great.
My question...are they going to hatch okay or need help? I'm a bit concerned. It's a while before they are due to hatch but thought I'd be proactive about this.
Thanks!

 

[minihorse927]

Last night I checked the incubator and one of the eggs was leaking. A crack in shipping that I missed? Wasn't any signs there had ever been life. So I try to get it out of there. It's dried where it leaked and stuck....I try wetting it, pulling it gently, prying it....it broke....omg!! I don't think in my entire life I've ever smelled anything so horrid! And I've changed poopy diapers Cleaned it all up and out of there but talk about yuck. Next time I will do a better job candling them!!

But I actually do have a question and I hope this is the place. When I got the eggs some of them were so tiny that I didn't have much hope for them. Well some of those are veined and looking great. My question...are they going to hatch okay or need help? I'm a bit concerned. It's a while before they are due to hatch but thought I'd be proactive about this. Thanks!

mine generally manage to hatch on their own, and some of mine come from tiny eggs too! I helped one this year and it was the first one to hatch of this year. Now I'm up to 21 call babies this year. The other have made it out on their own. You just have to watch them when they start to hatch and see if they are having trouble. You might ask the person you got them from and see if theirs have ever needed assistance hatching.

 

[Henhorse123]

Can anyone tell the colour of this guy he. is round a week old and any tips for sexing then, i have heard about the quack method

 

[Amykins]

Oh, he is adorable!! <3 He looks like any regular grey call, but I'm not an expert... :/

 

[Starkasm]

.

mine generally manage to hatch on their own, and some of mine come from tiny eggs too! I helped one this year and it was the first one to hatch of this year. Now I'm up to 21 call babies this year. The other have made it out on their own. You just have to watch them when they start to hatch and see if they are having trouble. You might ask the person you got them from and see if theirs have ever needed assistance hatching.

I have some calls and their eggs have always been pretty good sized in comparison. Recently I thought we'd add some so I was quite surprised at how small some of these were. This gives me peace of mind, Thank you!

 

[rlmitchell]

Thank you!!

 

[Going Quackers]

Can anyone tell the colour of this guy he. is round a week old

and any tips for sexing then, i have heard about the quack method

so cute! i had to wait till mine did the voice change before i could tell, not had enough of them to know as wee ones, the females are LOUD. The breeder i was at seemed to know better by looking but she's seen enough, kinda like me and my scovies when you've seen enough you learn to see the subtle differences at younger ages.

 

[angiert]

Okay, for the risk of sounding extremely ignorant, can someone tell me what "call ducks" are??? It sounds like there are lots of breeds that are considered call ducks??? Is a blue swedish a call duck???

you can't really tell the huge size difference here... but this is a call duck and a blue swede...

 

[angiert]

is this khaki? this is the sweetest baby! hubby calls her butter...i let him name 2 of 8 lol

 

[Sweetfolly]

Do you have them separated by color or are all the chocolates running together?

I have a Self-Black drake (purchased a few years ago from duckluck - I'm pretty sure my drake's daddy is her "Blackjack", his picture is the second post way back at the beginning of this thread) who is carrying a single (heterozygous) copy of a chocolate dilution over a Self-Chocolate hen and 3 Bibbed Lilac hens. So, while every single bird in the pen DOES have the Chocolate dilution, not all the ducklings pick it up. They throw Blacks, Blues, Chocolates, and Lilacs - usually Bibbed, but I have hatched one Self-Chocolate this year from that pen.

The Chocolate Magpies are in a separate pen along with my regular Black and White Magpies and Blue Magpies. I hatched TONS of Chocolates (Bibbed, Magpie, and Ancona patterned) from that pen last year, but I added an excellent Blue Bibbed drake this spring to improve the type on my Magpies, so I've been hatching mostly Blue Magpie and Blue Pied from that pen this year.






I usually sell eggs as an assortment from all 3 of my breeding pens (pen #3 is set up to produce Self-Blues) though, because I'm only getting 1-3 eggs a day from each pen at the moment. This past week has been especially bad as far as the number of eggs I've gotten from the Calls. Too much hot, humid, stormy weather. It's supposed to cool down this coming week, but then there's the holiday weekend, so no shipping!