Gunterina
Just before the first COVID lockdown in 2020, I came into the possession of a mallard duck egg, now the story of how it came to me is one in itself, but I will save that for another day and for the children involved. All I will say is that some misguided youngsters had disturbed and damaged a duck’s nest to the extent that the mother did not return. This came from a position of innocence and misunderstanding.
Ducks like most birds lay one egg a day for as many days as it takes to complete their clutch, so a brood of twelve eggs will take a mother duck twelve days to lay, the average clutch size for a Mallard is between 8 and 13 eggs. She will then cover the eggs over each day with some downy feathers and leave them to go back to the water until she has laid her last egg, when the 28 day incubation vigil begins. Over this period she will leave the nest only occasionally and for a very short time to drink and if possible eat something and then she is back to it, the colder the weather the quicker she is likely to return as once she has started incubation, she must not let the eggs get cold. Birds do this to make sure that the eggs all hatch within a very short time of each other on the same day. There are some exceptions to the rule leading to asynchronous hatching, but it makes a lot of sense for a duck to have 12 chicks the same age rather than a 12 day old and an egg still hatching with lots of different ages in between. This means waiting and leaving cold eggs in the nest until she is ready to start incubating them all together.
This may seem obvious to some people, but many people still don’t realise the system and so they may inadvertently meddle with a healthy nest of eggs, thinking they are saving them! When people (in this case children) see a nest with, for example, 3 cold eggs in it, they might wrongly assume it to have been abandoned, this was the case with the children involved, and so they learnt a lesson when informed of their mistake. As an offshoot I was left with a single, cold, duck egg. I tried to return it to the nest removing the 2 broken eggs, to see if mother duck would continue, but she did not return the next day at all.
I had an incubator in the loft which I had once used to hatch some chickens. Down it came and in went the egg. I quickly ordered some fertile chicken eggs from eBay to give the potential duckling some potential company. Chicken egg incubation is about 7 days shorter than ducks, so I hoped to align the hatching. We regularly lamped the eggs to check progress and my young children loved this, this involves shining a torch behind the egg to check the progress and from a few days of heat you can see the blood vessels developing, it is truly amazing to watch. The duck egg had a very slight crack in it from the start, but I could tell it did not go through into the shell membrane so was happy to give it a go at life!
After 28 days, 2 days before her chicken step-siblings hatched, a duckling arrived. We had been watching closely as the egg started to move and cheeping could be heard from inside, indicating that she had broken into the air pocket at the end of the shell. She first broke through the shell with a tiny hole (called pipping) using her egg tooth which baby birds have on the end of their beak, it falls off shortly after hatching is complete. Then she started to unzip the egg shell, working her way around the shell.
It is very tempting to help at this point, but those of you who have hatched birds will know that you should not, because they can still be attached by the umbilical cord to the inner egg membrane, releasing them too early can lead them to bleed to death which is obviously deeply upsetting. However, if the membrane is too dry and the chick has been at it for a very long time usually 24 hours, and seems to be getting weaker, then a careful helping hand might be in order. This is often the case with duck eggs in my experience as it is hard to get the moisture levels correct in a fairly cheap incubator so the membrane is often a bit too dry, making hatching harder for them. Boy is hatching hard enough already, you can see how exhausting it is when you watch it live, and it always amazes me how curled up and squashed in the baby bird is.
Ducklings emerge wet and remind one of the dinosaurs they are so closely related to. After an hour or so of drying out they are just about the cutest* thing in the known universe. And I always look at the egg shell and think how on earth was that, in there, only an hour ago.
The duckling was named Gunter after my children’s favourite character in the movie Sing, which was the current favourite with them in Spring 2020. She imprinted on us for lack of a mother or siblings and so we had a very tame, extremely gorgeous duckling following us about in lockdown and making a lot of mess.
To be continued….