James Ward
Hatching
- May 31, 2017
- 2
- 6
- 6
Hi everyone,
First, a little bit of background: I have a little mallard duckling that is the youngest out of 9 ducklings we currently have. The rest of the ducklings are mixed Pekins and we hatched them ourselves. The mallard was several days late for hatching and got stuck in the egg so eventually we broke and helped them out as they had managed to unzip the egg but they were completely stuck. After helping him out he had that relatively common club foot problem on both legs but we got it straightened out in the first day and he has been quite happily running about for the week or so since. The only problem seemed to be that he was growing A LOT slower than the other ducklings and much slower than other mallards we have had before but the other ducks seemed to be taking care of him, always putting him on the inside of the huddle etc.
However, this morning when i came downstairs the ducks had emptied their water into the bottom of their enclosure and we found that while the other ducklings were a bit cold but overall fine, the little mallard was on it's back shivering totally saturated with water. We cleaned up the enclosure and put the others back in but kept the mallard out to dry off and eventually put him back in the incubator on low humidity to dry off. However, at this point we noticed that the duckling's right leg was laid behind him at an odd angle and when he tried standing it was turned in and in the wrong position. After a close examination and feel, it feels like he has dislocated his leg at the hock, probably by being stepped on by another one of the ducks. No vets in the area seem likely to help us as it's hard to justify racking up a vet bill on a little duckling that may not make it anyway. Is there anything that we can do to fix the joint ourselves ?
First, a little bit of background: I have a little mallard duckling that is the youngest out of 9 ducklings we currently have. The rest of the ducklings are mixed Pekins and we hatched them ourselves. The mallard was several days late for hatching and got stuck in the egg so eventually we broke and helped them out as they had managed to unzip the egg but they were completely stuck. After helping him out he had that relatively common club foot problem on both legs but we got it straightened out in the first day and he has been quite happily running about for the week or so since. The only problem seemed to be that he was growing A LOT slower than the other ducklings and much slower than other mallards we have had before but the other ducks seemed to be taking care of him, always putting him on the inside of the huddle etc.
However, this morning when i came downstairs the ducks had emptied their water into the bottom of their enclosure and we found that while the other ducklings were a bit cold but overall fine, the little mallard was on it's back shivering totally saturated with water. We cleaned up the enclosure and put the others back in but kept the mallard out to dry off and eventually put him back in the incubator on low humidity to dry off. However, at this point we noticed that the duckling's right leg was laid behind him at an odd angle and when he tried standing it was turned in and in the wrong position. After a close examination and feel, it feels like he has dislocated his leg at the hock, probably by being stepped on by another one of the ducks. No vets in the area seem likely to help us as it's hard to justify racking up a vet bill on a little duckling that may not make it anyway. Is there anything that we can do to fix the joint ourselves ?