Hatching Ducklings

With all of our broody chickens, we thought we would try to hatch out some ducklings. I mean, why not, right?

Well, we tried it and we were having a lot of trouble with our hatch rate. We tried 3 clutches and were only able to get 1 chick. So, I hit the chicken blogs and tried to do some research into hatching out the ducklings.

There are several things that we changed:

First, when hatching ducklings you need to keep mama in a broody box. The ducklings need more water than a chick, and the mama hens sometimes don't take them to the water as much as they need.

Second, and most importantly, the ducks when sitting on the eggs will generally go swimming first then sit. As such, you need to increase the humidity on the eggs. If you don't, often the shells will be too hard for the ducklings to escape. What I do is take a squirt bottle and spray the eggs once per day. We have only hatched out one clutch since trying the squirt bottle and it worked! We had 2 ducklings hatch and they are doing great!