Glad it went well! If you can see a “flutter” around the pip, then that’s air moving in and out and you don’t need to do anything. It’s a very small, constant motion of tiny little breaths. However, I think that what CluckNDoodle was suggesting is that you can use something like tweezers to pull off a bit of the already broken shell bits at the pip, so you can see the membrane beneath. That membrane should already have a little slit in it where the duckling broke through. That’s the opening that allows it to breathe while it very slowly absorbs yolk. If there is no little slit and the duckling cracked only shell without piercing the membrane, then you can tear a tiny hole in the now exposed membrane. Then you stop and wait, probably for a day or more. You don’t usually need to do any of this, but since your duckling is malpositioned, it may not have made a full pip.
The problem with these interventions is that the more you mess around in the Hatcher, the harder it is to keep humidity high for hatching. If humidity gets too low, this and other babies get “shrink wrapped” where that membrane dries out and sticks to the duckling. So, any intervention is a trade off. When I was messing with my duck eggs at hatching, I had a spray bottle with warmed (about same temp as incuabtor) water that I misted lightly in the Hatcher when I opened the lid to keep the humidity up. If you do this, only use warm water or you will chill your hatchling duckies, which is bad. Otherwise, if you need to interve, then be fast to keep the lid closed as much as possible. I pulled the egg out and set it on a moist warmer I made. Work quickly, replace the egg. My moist warmer was a cloth bag of rice, lightly microwaved to make it barely warm (don’t cook your baby!) with a warm damp paper towel over it. If you don’t have a warmer, don’t use the damp paper towel as it will cool too fast and cool the baby. BTW, my attempts at duckling intervention turned out to be totally UNnecessary, though at least I was careful enough that they were not harmful either. I got nervous because my mallard ducklings had pipped for 36 hours with no progress. I’d been hatching chickens right before that, and 24 hr is a long time for a chick to be pipped with no progress. When I removed a bit of the pipped shell for my ducklings, as described above, I could see their bills and that they were breathing and vigorous; they were just sitting and absorbing yolk, which is a critical thing for ducklings to do before they hatch! I also suspect that they were in communication with my slower hatching Welsh Harlequin ducklings so that they could all hatch at about the same time, which is what happened, even though mallards typically have a few days shorter incubation than bigger ducks.
Edit: on a ridiculously long post, I mangled the word “unnecessary”! I did NOT need to have intervened in my case!
