animal Archives - Michael GJ Arts

A few months back, I incubated a small number of duck eggs hatched from my personal flock, and dispersed them between two of my friends.

Ducklings are notoriously difficult to sex, and even after consulting many educational sources, Joe and I were ultimately incorrect with two and so he ended up with three drakes and one female.

When they grew up a little and molted, and our mistake became apparent, we decided to ‘dress’ the extra drakes and make dinner out of one and freeze the other.

Joe, who was a sous chef earlier in life, did a fantastic job of butchering and cooking up the duck! He made a broth from the duck neck, and cooked up the legs and breasts and served them with pasta and white sauce!

It’s quite remarkable the amount of food one duck provides, and even more remarkable is the innate ability we possess to reduce the principal to oneself. From incubating the eggs, raising the ducklings, dressing, and then culminating into a gourmet home-cooked meal, and that it can be done all in your backyard by yourself, or better yet, with the help of a friend!

This is the kind of activity and skill we as a civilized society ought to cultivate. The natural world is our birthright, and our stewardship over it is realized by integrating our motion into its natural harmony.

I recently made the decision to add quail into my daily husbandry repertoire. I researched them extensively and decided that on top of my daily and enjoyable chicken and duck care regime, adding quail would not require a substantial increase in my daily effort.

I purchased a $75 second hand large metal bird enclosure, a $50 incubator on ebay, and a few dozen hatching eggs of the Coturnix variety which cost me just under another $50 I believe, with shipping.

When it all came together and I had picked up my hatching eggs from the post office, I realized that my incubator could not hold them all. This I addressed by creating another home-made incubator with egg trays in a box with a thermometer and heat lamp to hold the remaining eggs.

I allowed the eggs to warm to room temperature and followed the instructions for incubating closely. I had to manually turn the incubating eggs in the over-flow region. As the days went by, I genuinely started doubting that any should hatch. They came in the mail and could have been subjugated to temperature and humidity shifts, or perhaps that my state’s low humidity and dryness might come into play with a negative effect over the course of 16-17 days needed to properly incubate.

Needless to say, I was honestly surprised and in awe when I entered the room to check the eggs and lo and behold there was my first chick hatched!

Now you are not supposed to take the first chick out immediately. Opening the incubator can cause a drop in temperature and humidity that can essentially shrink-wrap the remaining chicks. So you are supposed to wait 24 hours before removing the first batch of hatchies.

It is such a beautiful animal right out of the egg. They are so happy to be alive and out and about from the egg. It was difficult waiting while the one chick chirped from within the incubator alone.

The next hatch was in the make-shift incubator which I started a day later and so was expecting them to hatch after the ones in the real incubator, but one hatched and fell right into the humidity water pool so I pulled it out early and placed it under the heat plate in the enclosure.

The next morning, there is an orchestra of chirps coming from the incubator room and when I check the incubator there are over ten hatches! It has been 24 hours so I remove and place the first batch into the enclosure. More may still hatch within the next 4 days.

Tag: animal

From Ducks to Dinner:

Hatching Quail Eggs I Received Through The Mail