Need some help

[BelovedBirds]

We are going to try hatching ducks for the first time and my question for you is when do you start taking them out to cool and spray and do you do it up to lockdown? I have heard this also and was having trouble getting our humidity up to the high level I read about (similar as the original poster) but was happy to find others have had success with lower humidities.

Personally I don't cool them, it just leaves a risk of dropping them, or forgetting and leaving them too long, in my opinion it simply is not needed.
If you want to, hopefully someone else who practices it can advise

I did mist my eggs, and this is really done in the second half of incubation, I misted mine about once a day for the week before lockdown, it helps them to lose moisture
If you're struggling to get humidity up, just remember that it's the surface area of water, not the depth
A wider dish, would create higher humidity. You can also use wet sponges. Just ensure any container of water is inaccessible, perhaps covered with a grid of some kind to prevent any babies falling in once they hatch.

 

[CluckNDoodle]

We are going to try hatching ducks for the first time and my question for you is when do you start taking them out to cool and spray and do you do it up to lockdown? I have heard this also and was having trouble getting our humidity up to the high level I read about (similar as the original poster) but was happy to find others have had success with lower humidities.

It's been a while since I've incubated waterfowl but I believe I sprayed for 10 days. I left the incubator open while the eggs dried to allow for better evaporation and then I closed the incubator again (I think this took 10-15 minutes). I always used room Temp water to do this.
Just monitor the air cell while doing this to make sure they aren't losing to much weight.

I did hatch some waterfowl without misting the eggs once and my personal experience was that the membrane was much tougher for them during hatch so I feel there was definite benefit. I only observed this once because I always misted otherwise and I predominantly hatched chickens so waterfowl were just a handful of my hundreds of hatches, lol.