Day 29 for a duck egg...no signs of movement

[Teacher1993]

Hi everyone!
Back story first. So this was an unexpected duck egg into my life. A mallard duck laid it next to my pool and then didn't come back for it. I got an incubator for it and it was growing. On day 25, I put more water in it for a higher humidity around 75%. On day 27, I opened the lid for 5 seconds to add more water. There was a small hole in which Humidity was seeping through.

Now today is day 29. No movement, no pipping (that I know of) Humidity is now 63%. Do I add more water? Should I be concerned that this mallard duck hasn't done anything with it being day 29? What do I do? I know nothing about ducks!!! I am freaking out and I do not want make a mistake.

Thank you in advance!

 

[Quackup]

I'm new at hatching duck eggs myself, but learn from my mistakes. I was so disappointed to find several ducks 95% developed that failed to hatch. I believe I inadvertently created too many temperature changes in hindsight.

After my first hatch with only 25% success, I'm experimenting with an empty incubator and numerous thermometers and hydrometers including one that transmits data points to an app in my smart phone. Adding water when taking the top off lowers the temperature and takes longer than I would have thought to recover. If the incubator is actually on the low side of the range anyway due to not being calibrated properly like mine wasn't, then matters are worse.

I believe that's what happened to me on my losses and I hope it didn't happen to you too.

 

[Teacher1993]

Thank you for the wonderful information. The duck did not survive. It probably died during the end of the third week. I can take this information and learn if I ever decide to hatch duck eggs on purpose.

 

[Quackup]

Sorry to hear the duckling didn't make it. In case you want to try hatching one again sometime, I'll share what I'm learning. The ten ducklings that did hatch are definitely an entertaining bright spot.

In order to improve my hatch rates and also because I want to try some more exotic birds one day, I placed a device that I found on Amazon in my incubators that provides continuous temperature and humidity readouts to my smart phone using a Bluetooth connection. The graphs and data points for a 24 hour period proved that there were wider temperature fluctuations than I thought. I'm sure that's the primary reason I lost some embryos.

Now I have my incubators in a closed bedroom and learned that if I leave a 250 watt infrared brooder light aimed at the carpet from a safe distance, it heats about a square yard of carpet to 90 degrees. That in turn raises the overall room temperature to 77 degrees even though we keep the rest of the house at 72 degrees or less. Since doing this, the graphs showing the temperature fluctuations reveal less than a half a degree variance either side of 99.5 per day.

In the clarity of hindsight, I took for granted my incubator would compensate for room temperatures that might dip below 70 degrees when going in and out of the front door on cooler spring days for example. Adding even small amounts of cool water to the reservoir to bring up the humidity affected temperature for longer than I considered as well, now that I have the graphs showing every deviation.

Last, but certainly not least, knowing what the temperature really is can be a challenge. I distributed multiple digital thermometer/hydrometers and several liquid thermometers in the same incubator for a day. No two read the same and I learned the hard way that the factory readout of the incubator was way off.

Even though I could verify that my liquid thermometers read 32 in ice water, they would vary at incubator temperatures, so I couldn't trust those either. I remember taking science courses where we used mercury thermometers. They're harder to come by now, but I found some used in the photo industry and also ones sold to veterinarians.

I'll use the certified mercury thermometers to calibrate the blue tooth device and then I'll know exactly what the temperatures are at any given time. Wish I had known enough to do this the first time, but perhaps this post will help someone else before they lose any embryos due to temperature inaccuracies and fluctuations they're not mindful of.

The incubator in the photo is a commonly found import that's been replaced by much better ones. Nonetheless, it's able to Illustrate what I mean about diversity in temperature readouts for various devices commonly used to check incubator temperatures and humidity levels..