My family’s got into the habit of raising ducks every year. We buy them as day-olds from a duck farm in the country and keep them around all summer, until instinct kicks in and they migrate in the fall. They’re pretty fun pets, because you can leave the kitchen windows open and hear them wandering around in a pack in the backyard, quacking and stripping every single plant in my mom’s garden.
Last year my dad took them in every week to the kindergarten class at the local grade school. They were so popular that most of the faculty ended up coming into the kindergarten classroom and awwwwwwing over them. They are pretty cute. This year, he decided to do the same thing, but hatch them from eggs. The first batch of eggs we ordered got mailed to us, and didn’t hatch. So rather than disappoint the kindergarten class, we made the six-hour round trip to the duck farm and bought half a dozen eggs that were guaranteed to hatch on Monday. They’re all blue eggs that are about the same size as chicken eggs.
Sunday night, I check the eggs in the incubator and see three that are dimpled, meaning the ducks are just starting to hatch. We call my cousin, who’s hatched ducks before, and he assures us that it takes something like 18 hours for them to hatch.
Amazingly, I manage to wake up at 8 in the morning on Monday, stagger out of bed and put some clothes on in a manner that won’t get me arrested or traumatize the kindergarteners. As I walk into the kitchen, I hear peeping. Loud peeping. I run to the incubator, thinking one of them’s hatched already. But the duck’s only managed to wedge his beak out of a crack in the egg and start peeping. Picture an egg with a tiny duck’s beak sticking out of one end; it was pretty funny-looking. The other eggs are all cracked as well, and the other two are dimpled. Dad loads the incubator in the back of the car and drives about 10 mph all the way to the school.
The kindergarteners flip when we bring in the incubator. The teacher can barely get them to sit down. Seeing their faces as they looked through the little plastic window at the hatching eggs was pretty incredible. You just knew they’d still be talking about how cool this was when they were angry acne-ridden eighth graders on the same playground. We leave the incubator there for the day, and check back at noon to see how the eggs are coming along.
At this point I go home and pass out, seeing as I’d had two hours of sleep the night before. Dad goes back up to the school at 3 and brings home the incubator. When I wake up, two of them have hatched. They’re still not dry enough to come out of the incubator, but you can see them through the little plastic window: wet, extremely fragile-looking and stumbling blindly through a world much bigger and stranger than the tiny egg they’ve just broken out of.
Two more hatch a few hours later, one of them butt first. Don’t ask me how he managed to do it. The first two are huddled under a heat lamp in a plastic box, still trying to grasp the concepts of “food” and “water.” Dad checks the fifth egg sometime around midnight, and thinks the duck’s having a problem getting out of it. He cracks the shell open and puts the duckling under the heat lamp. The sixth egg never hatches, but we’ve managed to successfully hatch five ducks, which is pretty cool.
In the morning, Dad notices that the duck he helped out of its shell has a crack in its beak. It’s healing up, but the duck probably would have died if he hadn’t taken it out. The one with the cracked beak still isn’t completely dry, amazingly. He looked pretty ragged for a while there, but it looks like he’s going to be okay.
He’s also taken to calling the first one that hatched “the bully,” which I think is pretty funny because the duck is a palm-sized ball of brown and yellow fluff who weighs approximately as much as a Marshmallow Peep.
They’re two days old today, and we just took them back up to the kindergarten classroom for their first day being able to stand up and walk around. They get big fast. They’re probably about twice the size now that they were when they hatched. In the five minutes we were there setting up the heat lamp and the food, at least half a dozen people came in to stare at the ducks and talk about how adorable they are. Ducklings have a way of doing that to people.
