It’s a dark and stormy day. Outside, there’s a thunderstorm going on with lightning and driving rain. Inside, in their incubator, the Muscovy eggs are hatching.
Four of the eggs have obvious external pips, and we can hear the ducklings peeping inside the shells. Duck eggs are hard and the membranes are tough, so these little guys have their work cut out for them.
Surprisingly, one of the pipped eggs is one of Piper’s that was added a couple of days after we set the initial group. It’s hatching earlier than expected, but still within the “normal” hatching window.
The last time we tried incubating Muscovy eggs, they seemed to develop but none pipped externally, so it’s a relief to see little bills working to break out of those shells. It may take a couple more days for all of the eggs to hatch, but it looks like we should see some long-awaited ducklings shortly!
Yesterday, we sexed the February kits and separated them by gender. They’re a little over ten weeks old now, and they’re starting to have skirmishes.
Loretta’s nine kits are all alive and well, and spending most of their time doing what kits do…sleeping. This litter’s sire is Raylan, a very mellow and friendly white New Zealand buck. While Loretta isn’t as outgoing as Ava (a white NZ doe), she is reasonably tolerant of being handled and is a good mother. She fostered Waldo, also a white NZ, when Waldo was a kit and too small to compete with his 10 littermates. We’re happy to report that it’s impossible to tell which kit is Waldo now; all four of Ava’s white kits look nearly identical.
We got a good look at Coraline’s ducklings this morning, and they are cute as can be. One of the quick photos we snapped before she got too huffy showed eight little ones. We also thought we spied one unhatched egg, which is still within the “normal” hatching timeframe – actually, it could conceivably even hatch within the next few days.
Coraline and the ducklings drank some water (we put a small chicken “fountain” waterer in there, too small for any of the ducklings to accidentally fall in), ate some food, and mom even took a couple of bites of the slightly out-of-control vegetation growing in the duck enclosure; we noticed that when she went for the greens, she positioned herself in front of the ducklings on the coop ramp so they couldn’t come out. They’ll be chowing down on greens and bugs in no time, too. 