My ducklings are all grown up and ready to have their own babies.

Exciting times have arrived at my house. Last spring we added our very first male duck, Felix, and two more females to our flock in the hopes of getting fertilized duck eggs. Felix is now nine months old. I started seeing Felix getting frisky with his girls and decided it was time to buy an incubator and start checking for fertilized duck eggs.

I got a great deal on ebay on a 96 egg incubator.

Unpacking and assembling the incubator was intimidating. The idea of trying to help new life grow and thrive is also very intimidating. I really had no idea what I was doing once I got the incubator. How do you tell if an egg is fertilized? How to you incubate the eggs? Basically, ever step of this is new and I'm learning as I go.

Putting the incubator together was hard. The instruction booklet only told me how to use the thing. I had to look up people putting it together on youtube and none of the videos were in English. I finally figured it out by watching people closely to see where things went.

Starting off with 23 eggs

I had 23 eggs set aside that I had no idea if they were fertile or not. I got an egg candling flashlight and started shining light through each egg. Some very completely clear inside and some had a yellow mass floating in it. It took a while to figure that the clear ones weren't fertile and the ones with the yellow mass were. The first batch of eggs I put every single one in the incubator not knowing how to tell.

I put all 23 eggs, no matter what they looked like in the incubator and waited four days. On the fourth day I candled each one and happily most of them were showing signs of life. After four days I could see red veins starting to form in the top of the egg near the air sac. I'm pretty sure Sammy, my Pekin, isn't getting mated by Felix. She's bigger than him and her eggs are really big so I can easily shine a light and see none are fertile. I think the rest of the girls are getting mated and so far only Sammy's are not fertile.

Day #4 pictures

Day #8 Candling and Seeing Movement

I took video on this day and no pictures. I can't get the video downloaded at the moment to share here. Seeing developing baby ducks moving inside the egg is the coolest thing ever! I get to see my baby ducks growing day by day inside their eggs. On day #8 I read their eyelids, knees, and spine are just forming.

Day #12 and things are going well

You can see that dark mass inside the egg which is the forming duckling. So far I don't see any eggs that have died but that can still happen. I see movement in 17 of my first eggs. I realized a number of the first 23 weren't fertile so I removed them and am down to 17.

I have around 36 eggs in the incubator at the moment and have been adding them every few days when I have at least eight eggs to make a nice group of ducklings to hatch together. It takes around 28 days to hatch a duck egg so I still have a little ways to go before the babies arrive.

I've already created a listing for ducklings for sale to take pre-orders because a lot of people prefer newly hatched ducklings. I plan on keeping a few but most will go up for sale. Before I was selling duck eggs for eating and found it a nice side business. It'll be interesting if I can do well selling ducklings.