Incubating call duck eggs

[AliciaM]

I have 5 call ducks... 2 boys and 3 girls..(not including 4 call ducklings unrelated and not sure of the sex).. I also have 4 adult laying hens...and 9 young hens..They all share a huge pen and coop... the pen is approx. 21 feet wide by about 85 ft long... The coop is an old horse shed that was enclosed for the chickens....

Well, the ducks have been making a nest in one corner... they dug a hole and each take turns sitting and laying an egg.. so far I have gotten 5 eggs. (2 are in the fridge because my mother in law didnt realize they were duck eggs... LOL) the other 3 are in an incubator with a bunch of chicken eggs.

My questions are... do call ducks bury there eggs? the 2 from today were kinda buried....If I leave them in the nest, will one of the ducks set them? Or, if I incubate them, will they be ok if there a week or so younger than the chicken eggs in there? I add them to the incubator as I find them..

Also.. all the eggs are light greenish/blue.. except one.. its very dark green and a bit longer than the rest... is that normal?

Im gonna get pics of my ducks so you all can see how cute they are.....

Thanks.

 

[miniwhipkey]

Call ducks are very hard to incubate. They need to be on their side and turned by hand. The humidity is very important to be around 55%. It is different for chickens, so I don't know if that will work.

You can put some fake eggs in place of the real ones to see if your female does go broody. If you look on some older posts, there is exact directions for incubating Call Eggs. I hope this helps.

 

[SundownWaterfowl]

This is what I do, other breeders do it differently and still have good success with hatching them.

I either use my Brinsea Octagon 40 which sits on an auto turner and the whole incubator turns side to side, or my hovabator genesis 1588 and hand turn. If hand turning the eggs are on their side. If in the Brinsea the eggs are air sac up. I keep the humidity around 35%-40% the first 23 days. I dont add any water to the incubator, only mist, and it stays around 35-40%. Around day 4 or 7 I start cooling eggs for up to 15 min per day, and mist them with water during that cooling period. Day 23 I stop turning and bump the humidity up to around 75%. I hatch them out in egg cartons with the sides trimmed down and holes poked in the bottoms. I use the paper cartons. They hatch on day 26-27.

 

[lovesduckies]

i wish you luck!!!!!!!!!