Incubating duck and chicken eggs

 I have put on some of the runner duck eggs to incubate. They take approx 28 days to hatch

This is day 3 and you can start to see veins growing that will feed the growing embryo (circled in the 2nd picJ. The large orange blob is the yolk.

I have also bought some Silkie Chicken eggs. They are a very small and impractical chicken with fluff instead of proper feathers which means they tend to get cold if not given good shelter. They don’t lay that many eggs either and those they do lay are tiny. I have a strange yearning to have them despite this, they are super cool with black flesh (not just black skin, even their organs and bones are black - but not their eggs). They are also very broody chickens and I hope that they will take some of the burden of raising chicks or ducklings in the future… We shall see. 

I bought 12 eggs and sadly it is difficult to hatch eggs that have been sent in the post - I couldn’t find any close by - because the structures inside the egg can get damaged. You can see on this one for example that the air cell has split in 2 (the darker curved shapes at the bottom of the egg - yolk is at the top of the egg), this means that when the chick tries to peck in to the air cell as it hatches it may miss it and suffocate during hatching. It is possible the two bits will join during incubation and it is possible the chick lucks out during hatching and hits part of the air cell anyway. We shall see!

I have seen people suggesting better results from setting the egg on its tip for hatching (in an egg box maybe) rather than on its side. Planning on giving that a go. That would be the other way up than it is here.

This one has a more normal air cell