Curiosity Cat's Suburban Homestead

The kids found bantam (bantam=miniature) chicken eggs in our hay stack. Callie (who’s been in this blog before–see the honey harvest post) fell in love and wanted to hatch one. So… into the incubator they went! And today one hatched. Others are working. Be prepared for a cuteness overload. First, the hatching progression. Pip:

Expand:

Zip:

Push:

Pop:

Rest:

Done:

And to show you just how tiny this little guy is. In my hand:

And… the obligatory super-cute kids pics:

Our second batch of duck eggs is busy hatching. The process is fascinating to me, so I thought I’d share some progressive pictures of the hatch here.

Here are the eggs, lined up in an egg carton in the incubator. Two things are happening here: The good news is that several eggs have little teeny dents called “pips”–that’s the first little punch the duckling puts in the shell, in order to let in enough oxygen to continue the process. The pips are located just inside the concentric circles on the tops of the eggs, on the left side of those circles. The circles represent the growth of the air cell, so the pips occurred on the left side of the air cell (not all the eggs in this picture are pipped).

The sad thing that has happened is that one egg has a huge dent in the back from when I crushed it with a glass of water a couple days before this picture. I felt sick afterward, but several people told me to leave it be and see what would happen, so it’s still sitting there in this picture, bottom right.

After pipping, the duckling rests and absorbs the remainder of the yolk sac. This can take more than 24 hours. Having done that, the baby then begins to “zip”–it moves the hole outward from the pip, and basically draws a line around the bottom of the air cell, essentially creating a “cap” on the top of the egg. Here’s one just beginning to expand the pip:

And then, fully zipped:

Once the zipping is done, the baby begins to push upwards on the cap (this pic actually shows a time lapse of approximately 20 minutes from the above picture–the first few pushes don’t look as impressive):

This process goes on for another 10-20 minutes, with the hatchling expanding and contracting:

Finally, it pushes part way out. Hello, world!!!

When hatching eggs on their sides in the incubator, the baby tends to just “pop” out of the egg as soon as the cap comes off, and it then stumbles and slides all over the incubator until it is coordinated enough to control its muscles. When hatching in cartons as I did this time, the “popping” portion takes longer. It struggles one direction:

And then another. It stretches, and struggles against gravity, and finally–finally–makes its way out of the bottom portion of the shell. Although the struggle looks painful and difficult, the benefit of doing it this way is that by the time the duckling frees itself, it is already strong & coordinated enough not to injure itself or the other eggs in a frenzied stumble around the incubator. Instead, it’s ready for a little break:

Followed by some climbing exercise (and improved upon by another nap):

You may notice that Harry–our new duckling, named by Eli–is resting atop the sad little crushed egg.

A sad little crushed egg that–oh miracle–has pipped! Look closely–you can just see it–again, in the middle left portion of the air cell circles. And then look! Crushed egg zipped:

Crushed egg waiting… for Harry to finish his mama duck act:

Crushed egg accepting help. Harry is reaching around to offer encouragement and a little helpful peck or two. This kind of behavior is well documented–it’s clear that the first ducks out nearly always help the others. Notice also that some of the crushed egg duckling’s feathers are sticking out–that’s because she’s been pushing and contracting regularly for some time at this point. But the dramatic moment won’t come until Harry gets up and moves!

And, there she is!

Proof that crushing an egg doesn’t necessarily kill the duckling. And the vacant premises, after 29 days of housing a growing duckling:

And the miracle duckling, named Shining Pearl (by Monty), ten minutes or so after hatching:

Since then, we’ve had one more duckling hatch (a little yellow one, as yet unnamed), and several more working on zips. I’ll post as they arrive!

I know Hermione has grown this week. She seems HUGE to me. So I can’t figure out why in her “duck and egg” shot she doesn’t look even half an inch longer. In fact, she looks smaller to me. Why is this? Oh well. It’s hard to tell in the picture, but she (and Ron too) is growing juvenile feathers. They are just little “pin” feathers now, but when they are grown in they’ll spread out into full feathers. For comparison, let’s review. Week One:

Week Two:

And today (Week Three):

Here you can see the upright stance that is typical of an Indian Runner:

Dog and ducks:

And now, the promised kid pics. Monty and Eli are too busy playing Viva Pinata on the Xbox for pictures. So you’ll have to settle for a few of Everett. Oh, and there’s a silly one of me at the bottom. Here they are:

Helping Doo fix his car. He needs the help, too:

Running the Suburban Homestead “Tractor”:

Showing Mommy how to open the door:

And, finally, me. I know, it’s a goofy picture. But I’m usually holding the camera, so it’s at least something:

Just a quick shot of Ronnie (since we think he’s a she, we’ve amended her name to be more gender neutral) and Hermione at 2 1/2 weeks of age:

And then here are some eggs in the incubator. Put in eleven on Monday, then added two more Tuesday morning. I’m keeping all kinds of notes, and they’re all tied in to the pencilled info on the eggs themselves. Hopefully we’ll actually learn something from all the fun.  This will be my last batch this year, but I plan to start breeding in earnest next Spring, and will probably sell some ducklings along with those I raise for myself.

For review, Hermione’s One Week picture:

And now, her Two Week picture taken today. This is the exact same egg (which was later boiled & eaten–so next week’s picture will be a new egg). I did, however, hire a new hand model this week.

Can you believe she fit in an egg that size just two weeks ago? One of the ducklings–I believe it’s Ron–is making a weird honking/wheezing sound that I hope is the first sign of a quack. Only girls quack. Boys whisper. I would like both my ducklings to be girls, so I’m okay with having to rename “him.” I guess she would be Ronetta.

I’ve got 9 eggs awaiting incubation. I’ll collect whatever my girls deposit tomorrow and set them. I should be setting between 9 and 11 eggs, which will hatch around the beginning of September. My plan is to keep the females and *possibly* one male (depending on how many females I end up with–each male needs at least three females to maintain peace in the flock). I have additional ducks coming in the mail this Spring to augment my flock and begin my selective breeding program. Most eggs & ducklings will be eaten (eggs) and/or sold (eggs & ducklings), but I’m going to keep some and work on developing a “painted” Runner duck–one with somewhat random colored markings on a white background.

I didn’t think to get pictures, but we finally built the “waterfall” Eli’s been set on for several weeks. And by “built,” I mean we put white plastic down on the slope and turned the hose on at the top. Eli’s satisfied. I’m thinking of adding a kiddie pool at the bottom and a pump with a hose back to the top, so the kids can play on it without wasting so much water.

I have absolutely no new pictures of the kids, so my apologies, Mom. I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Eli is quite the philosopher. Today he asked me why, if God is in charge of everything, bad things happen. We had a very lengthy discussion and he actually came up, more or less on his own, with the answer that the devil makes bad things happen, and God makes good things happen, and we people get to choose whether we’re going to do good things or bad things. Not bad for a 5-year-old.

Everett is not philosophizing yet, but he does think he’s ready to drive:

Meanwhile, Avery dreams of opening his own car cleaning service:

“You work on this bit, Quincy… right… here”:

Quincy’s a good listener:

“I’ll clean up underneath”

“I know I can fit–a little help, please? Thanks!”

“You can pay us in old, dried-up tree branches. Thank you.”

Thanks for watching folks. This production has been brought to you by the following caprine personalities:

Quincy

And of course:

Avery

Thank you very much! Until next time…

No longer “The Duck Who Lived” alas. We really are very sad about it. He died yesterday morning of unknown causes. I woke in the morning to find him lethargic. Removed him from the enclosure, kept him warm in a blanket with water nearby, tried to feed him boiled egg yolk (as is recommended for sick ducklings). Here he is looking pitiful on his last day:

I checked on him every little while, and one time his bill was partially submerged. When I went to move it, he was already dead. Poor little guy. He was Eli’s favorite and (I admit) mine too. But Eli is convinced that he will come back to us in the next batch of eggs (duck reincarnation–is it possible–lol), so he is only sad that it will take a while before the next batch hatches.

While Harry was resting in the basket, I cleaned and disinfected the main brooding area and all the feeders and waterers, etc. just in case he had something contagious. The other ducklings seem fine.

And a picture of him how we want to remember him:

It turned out great! Here’s a shot  of Hermione, at eight days old, next to an egg the size of the one she hatched out of (I like it so much I’m going to try to get a picture like this each week to show her growth):

Hermione turned One Week yesterday, Ron today, and Harry will be One Week tomorrow. Here they are:

I wish I’d taken pictures next to a ruler or something right after they hatched, because it is amazing how much bigger they are. I held one up to an egg today (oh, that would be a good picture, wouldn’t it?) to see if it would still fit inside. What a joke!

So, anyway, some more pictures of the growing little cutie-pies. Hermione, enjoying an afternoon at the pool (a plastic paint tray filled with water):

Supervising the post-swim preening session (this one really needs a clever caption–ideas anyone?):

Ron (you can see his little curly top in this picture–he has a cute little swirly area at the back of his head):

Swimming really wears you out:

Ron joins Harry for the post-swim nap:

Okay, so after posting a few pictures and entries, it occurs to me that there might actually be a theme here besides just cute stuff to show my family. So, while the main mission remains to share our daily activities with my extended family, I’ve changed the name to reflect a wider potential audience. That’s all I wanted to say. I don’t even have any cute pictures today. Just a name change.