The girls hatched New Ducklings!

Well, last Tuesday farmer jenny went out to find 6 new ducklings in the greenhouse! We ended up with 3 making it. Long story sort of, but rookie mistakes and mother nature took 3. We are excited to have our first ducklings ever hatched under a duck here on Dowie Farm. Most of the time, if you let a broody duck sit on a nest, she will fail, get bored, have duck A.D.D., whatever. Apparently the deal is you get 2 of them isolated, and candle the eggs around the 2 week period. We had about 20 eggs in there at one point. We narrowed it down to about 10 after candling them. Some were not fertile at all, some had failed. But we put the ones with tiny little heartbeats back out there and voila! 6 ducklings! We will be sure to band the feet of the 2 that did this so we can use them going forward to produce more. Meanwhile, 3 new ducklings is not enough to keep up with next year's production and losses, so we ordered another 18 Hybrid White 300 layer ducklings from Metzer Farms. We have had great success with this breed and will eventually be almost exclusively using these ducks. I highly recomend them to anyone looking for maximum egg production from ducks. 300 jumbo eggs per year is hard to beat, even with chickens! So, here are some photos of the new babies! farmer Jenny did a nice job capturing the cuteness!