Introducing incubator mandarin ducks to flock

[upstatemandarins]

Hi guys,
We have 14 mandarin ducks we hatched in the incubator this year as we had to pull a nest due to frost.
They are in a brooder now with heat lamp and water and starter feed after we let them jump out of a tree outside.
When can we introduce them to our other ducks ?
Our other mandarin mamas are a week behind. Will they accept these chicks or pick on them?
Last year we had 2 from the incubator that didn’t jump and didn’t make it past 3 days unfortunately.
We just want to give these guys the best chance of survival.
Any help appreciated!
Thank you!
We have a large outside aviary with pond, a duck house and another 10x 10 enclosure that can be separated.
We also have two friendly female runner ducks.

 

[Debbie292d]

Hi,

I'm sorry nobody got back to you about this. How's it going? If you haven't tried it yet, I think they'd integrate fine but just in case, might want to have a few places for them to hide in case they get chased.

 

[upstatemandarins]

No worries, we are putting our 13 ducklings from the incubator in the outside pen today. They are doing great, even the one with the birth defect seems a lot better since we added vitamin b in their water.
We will keep them seperated from the adults for now then will slowly introduce them.
Our other females outside had 14 chicks and we let them take care of them as we did last year. They did great last year but not sure what happened because we found half of them dead so we took the remaining 7 away from mum to put in a brooder. Very sad but the remaining ones are doing well.
I didn’t want to risk losing any more.
Will update on their progress