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- #11
ColleenRyan
Songster
- Apr 9, 2018
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How often can I open the incubator?
Honestly, as often as you want, within reason. I open mine at least once a day to get in there and candle, turn eggs if I need to, etc. Once or twice a day won't hurt anything.
How long should it be opened for?
As long as you need to get stuff done. A mother duck will get off the nest for a half hour each day, so having it open for that long won't hurt anything.
How often do I candle?
I like to candle a lot. I usually start at around day 4, just for fun and to check, and then I candle again whenever I feel like it. I candle on day 10 to see what's developing and what's not so I can discard the infertile eggs, and then I check again periodically in case any stop growing so I can discard those as well.
When will I see (if i see) live ducklings forming?
A lot of times you can see something by 5, but give it until day 10 to be safe. This candling chart from Metzer might help you.
When (if) they hatch or start to hatch what can I do to help? I read about a "lockdown" where you raise the humidity to about 60% the last few days.
At lockdown, you stop turning and raise the humidity. I usually shoot for about 65% for the humidity at this time. Most of the time, you don't need to do anything to help, and they just hatch out on their own. However, occassionally you end up with one that's malpositioned etc and could use a bit of help to get out. If that happens, you can refer to the Assisted Hatching Guide for All Poultry.
Do ducklings just need the heat lamp, food and water when they're born? I got my babies when they were only about three days old so I'm assuming it's not much different.
Yes, they need a heat source, which a heat lamp works fine for, a food appropriate for ducklings such as a waterfowl starter, an all flock feed, Naturewise makes a feed they call Meat Bird that is appropriate for them, or you can use a chick starter, but if you did you would need to add additional niacin. And of course they do need water. You could add Nutri Drench or electrolytes to the water to give them a bit of a boost as well if you'd like.
Additionally, since this is your first time incubating, you might find the Beginner's Guide to Incubation helpful, as well as this article about determining what your humidity should be, since humidity varies for everyone.
And just a couple other things I noticed from your first postYou said that the incubator is keeping the temperature perfect - did you calibrate the thermometer you're using to monitor that to make sure it's actually accurate and correct? That's very important to do. Your hygrometer should also be calibrated to check for accuracy.
Eggs should be turned an odd number of times a day when you're hand turning, so that they spend the night on a different side each night. 3 times is fine but more is better if you can do it, since turning helps facilitate the growth of the chorio-allantoic membrane.
thank you SO much for all the info. The incubator has a temp on it but I put a little thermometer in there with a humidity gauge on it too and and the thermometer reads the same as the incubator. I'm not sure how else to calibrate it :/ I think I'll keep a tally next to my incubator to keep track of how often I rotate them because I can definitely do it more than three times. The thing I'm worried about most is just having no success because the newer eggs didn't make it and the others were too old. I'm trying my best though <3 your response was so helpful thank you so much. i'll check out the links now.
