Backyard Poultry Forum

Back on the forum again under a new name (was Wombat2 but couldn't remember the email I was using )
Bought an incubator for Christmas with the idea to control the replacement of laying chooks. Today my wife arrives home all excited with 12 fertile duck eggs from her cousin. Probably not ideal but will put 6 in the incubator and do 6 by hand (turning that is) They are Indian Runner X Khaki Campbell (we need to find out which is the father) I guess we follow normal duck incubating procedure -just need to know how long till hatching? Any way to sex by colour or other features? Our chooks come out brown females and yellow and grey males so they're easy.

David L.

28 days for incubation of duck eggs

My advice would be to keep the humidity lower than for chooks eggs until day 25 then crank it up to as high as you can get it for the remaining days. I ran my incubator dry (no water) for my last hatch and the humidity was under 30% most of the time. My air cells still could have been bigger... At hatch I use 70% which is as high as my incubator will go.

What colour were the Indian Runners? And, yeah, knowing if the Campbells were the Mum or Dad is important.

Any female offspring should lay pretty well Might make you give up on the chooks

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Cheerio, Rach
Blue Swedish Ducks