My duckling observations

I thought I'd share what I have learned this first year of muscovy raising.

1st, the more you feed you hens on the nest the easier it becomes to work with them when they hatch out! I tend to hand them a couple worms or some treats whenever I have some. Usually they'll bite but after a while they come to expect it rather than go into full defense mode.

2nd: A few reasons why eggs/ducklings fail (That I have observed).
1) Fail to grow, or die before the final week
If they don't start growing at all then likely the egg was not fertilized, I find usually the first egg laid is a dud although some mothers had all eggs develop.
If they fail after a couple weeks I found there was usually two reasons in my case. Either the eggs shell had a belmish and once the blood vessels grew close to that part the egg would die or the mother had too many eggs and some would not get enough warmth. This could be remedied by making sure you limit the eggs to the size of the hen, sometimes I didn't get a chance to catch them before incubation started.

2) Eggs that develop fine but fail to pip in the final days. This really bothered me so I started to take apart the failure to pips and found a constant theme. These ducklings all made the fatal mistake of breaking through the internal membrane right at one of the main blood vessels. This resulted in them bleeding out into the egg and dying. There doesn't seem to be any way to prevent this and is just part of natural selection. Usually I get one or two eggs that do this and usually you can see the blood against the shell and you know what happened. Very sad by Nature's way.

3) Eggs that pip but get rolled over. Couple times I had mothers that accidentally rolled over freshly pips eggs.... once rolled over the duckling drown inside the egg as you could see dried fluids on it's nostrils. I started checking my expecting mothers and saved a couple upside downers in doing so.

4) Duckling deaths in the first few days. A couple times now I've lost a duckling fresh off the nest and I think I figured out why. Rarely the membrane leftover from hatching is really thick and clogs there vent thus preventing them from relieving themselves. I make it a point to check their vents now when I do the hatch day head count and plan to gentley remove and large build up spots that I feel may not be able to get pushed out (Someone let me know if this isn't a smart thing to do, I haven't had to yet normally a pick up gets the vent cleaned up enough!)

Those are my lessons so far... and well don't leave the grain near the water bucket as on a hot day wet grain can ferment quickly and you'll have poison food. I was very mad at myself that day when I lost one of my first 8 week olds.

Feel free to comment or correct anything, I am not an expert at all just this is what I've seen in my first season raising ducklings.