Sometimes the universe hands you 19 fertilized duck eggs and says, “You seem like the person for this.”
Last week, a talent rep firm in Brooklyn received a mysterious package: 9 Pekin duck eggs, 10 White Muscovy eggs, and two incubators — courtesy of an enthusiastic admirer of a client’s work, one must assume.
Needless to say, the agency is not in the business of hatching waterfowl.
Through the powers of reddit and an Uber courier, the eggs made their way from Dumbo to Ridgewood, and then upstate to my farm in the West Catskills. After a 24-hour settling period (standard practice for shipped eggs), they’ve begun their incubation journey. Pekins hatch in about 28 days; Muscovies take closer to 35.
For now, they’re cozied up in an incubator I’ve already calibrated and trust — one that rotates large duck eggs automatically, which thankfully saves me from hand-turning them five times a day for the next month.
Strange beginnings, that’s for certain… This blog will document the journey to come.
So waddle come next?
At the start of incubation, I labeled and weighed each egg. As the embryos develop over the coming weeks, the eggs will naturally lose a bit of weight — this is normal and necessary. That weight loss happens because moisture slowly evaporates through the shell, allowing the air pocket inside the egg to grow.
For duck eggs, the goal is a total weight loss of about 11–13% by hatch time (with roughly 8–9% lost by day 25). That air pocket is what the duckling uses to take its first breath before fully hatching.
To make sure development stays on track, I’ll reweigh the eggs every couple of days and adjust the incubator’s humidity if they’re losing weight too quickly or too slowly.
With every round of incubation comes its own emotional arc — anticipation, hope, excitement, and of course, anxiety. There’s a special kind of headspace that you just lock into when you’re tending to life you cannot see yet.
Waterfowl require a bit more attention than chicken eggs, in the coming weeks I’ll begin manually cooling and misting them to simulate a mother duck leaving the nest to forage and returning damp from a swim. This believed to help support healthy development as hatch day approaches.
Illustrated chart showing duck egg candling and development.
In a few days, we’ll candle the eggs for the first time. If all is progressing as it should, we’ll start to see the earliest signs of life forming inside. I’ll share those updates here.
Thank you once again to everyone who helped get these eggs from parcel to incubator. ♥️
Till the next update,
P
