Now that holidays are past, and warm weather is just around the corner, I thought it might be time for a quick farm update.
Our little pigs that we got this fall are now fully fat, and ready to go to the butchers. Well at least a couple of them are going. We are actually keeping at least three of the females so that we can re-breed them and hopefully have more piglets again in the late summer.
Our chickens have been doing much better ever since we got the fence up around their area. No more coyote dinners! And our egg production has gone up again. The last bunch of babies that we ordered had a rough go of the winter, and we only have around 20 left (I didn't realized the mixed batch i ordered would come with the little bantums, and they just couldn't handle the cold, even up in the barn) but the ones that survived are doing well and growing. Hopefully we will see eggs from them in the next 6 weeks or so.
Our goats Chip and Pudding found new homes this month in exchange for another butcher pig, but Banana, the female goat, and Petunia the pot-belly pig are still enjoying being the pets of the farm family, and are fat and happy.
Our kittens are now full grown, and we are actually hoping for new ones to be born this spring.
And that about wraps it up for the farm family around here. Everything but the ducks that is, and we have some fun news to share about our ducks.
About 2 months ago, our ducks started laying eggs! This in itself was super fun, but we decided that after giving them a few weeks, we wanted to try to hatch out our own ducklings.
So about a month ago, we found a nest of eggs that they had laid outside the coop, and decided to use them for our first trial run at hatching eggs.
We decided to try out a doz, after reading that ducks are not always the easiest to hatch. We pulled out the incubator, cleaned it all up, and for 2 days adjusted the temperature until it was just where we wanted it.
While we waited for the temperature to regulate, I did my homework and read up on how to hatch duck eggs. Proper temperature, humidity, turns per day, how long duck eggs are supposed to take to hatch, tricks people had found to help the hatch succeed. Anything I thought would help out. Then I wrote out a few notes on a cheat sheet, and we dove right in.
After the first week (about 10 days actually) we "candled" all the eggs. This just means that you take them into the dark and shine a bright light into them to see if a baby has started growing. 6 of the eggs were duds. Nothing was happening inside. Well almost nothing. They were really starting to stink like true rotten eggs! So we took them outside a very safe distance from the house and tossed them out.
For the next 2 weeks we continued to daily monitor the humidity level in the incubator, and watched to be sure the temperature stayed correct. Thankfully, the incubator we have has an automatic rotater, so that I didn't have to physically roll the eggs over 3-5 times each day. I mean really, who has time to do that!?
At the 23 day mark, we took all the eggs out of the rotater and placed them directly on the tray. This is so that they don't injure themselves once they start to break open the shell. At this point, according to what we had read, we had to increase the humidity level, and be a lot more precise in our monitoring of it.
Day 26 came along, and we were excited! Everything I had read said that we should expect them to hatch anytime. So we watched and waited...and waited. Nothing! By the next Tuesday we were sure we had done it wrong, and that there would be no ducks. I decided to leave them in until the end of the week, but all of us kind of gave up on them. We stopped adding water and watching the humidity level.
Wed afternoon came along and i was sitting in my room when i thought i heard a bird noise. I listened for a bit, but there was nothing else, so i figured it was just a kids noise. Two or three more times that day I was sure i heard something, but every time i stopped to listen, there was nothing. Once I even went and checked in the incubator, but it didn't look like anything had changed, so I just thought that the kids must have a toy or something making an odd noise.
Wed night, after the kids were in bed, Jeff and I were sitting around visiting when I heard it again! I asked him if i was crazy, and he told me he heard it too! I checked out the incubator again, but still nothing seemed to be different. So I got on the computer and googled "do ducks peep while hatching?" Sure enough! I found out that indeed they do! Not always, but sometimes. This was exciting news! I immediately added water to the incubator and brought the humidity back up, hoping it wasn't too late. By the time we went to bed, we had heard the chirp several times, but nothing else was happening.
Thursday morning, I was awakened by the little chirp again. At 5:30 in the morning! But I was so excited to see if he had hatched that I couldn't go back to sleep, so I got up to check. The egg had just started to have a small hole.YEAH!
I found out, through my research, that this part of the hatching process, when the duck/chick is first starting to make a hole in the egg, is called "pipping" Once they have the hole to allow air into the egg, they then begin a process called "zipping" where they start cracking around the end of the egg, allowing them to push the end off.
For the rest of the morning, the kids and I watched as the duck progressed, until finally breaking out of its shell. Boy what an ugly little thing! LOL Seriously, they are not cute and fluffy until a few hours later, after their feathers dry out. But we were excited non the less. After almost 4 weeks of caring for, or as we laughed about "watering the eggs" we finally have a baby duck.
Unfortunately, I think out of the six eggs we had, this is the only one that is going to hatch. Thats ok. We learned a lot, and starting next week, we will try again and see if we can get more ducks next time, so stay tuned! For now, we are enjoying this cute little fluff ball (or at least he will be cute, as soon as he gets dried off lol)
