Here it is folks! Our very first duck egg. And, in addition, we think that the geese also laid a first egg -- but it was smashed and we weren't able to see it.
We retrieved this egg yesterday, and today ... there were two more!
Of course, I won't bring up the fact that I gave them to Sidge to set somewhere "safe" while JB and I ran around like mad people trying to catch ducks and geese and trim their wings because they were getting out of their enclosure so much. Sidge thought "safe" would be balancing it on his bike spokes.
Yeah. Ummm ... that didn't work so well.
Live and learn.
A bit of "trivia" while we are at it.
Ducks will lay eggs quite regularly. We could possibly get up to 10 or so eggs a day -- one for each of our females.
Geese? Not very often.
They don't lay in roosts as well as chickens do so most likely we will be retrieving them just from the pen. Eventually, a girl duck may "go broody" and she will decide to sit on a clutch. If you have a box available at that point, you can get some baby ducklings out of it.
Oh, another thing I learned today. Apparently, when you crack the duck egg, if there is a tiny red dot, that means it is fertilized. This one was. We have been seeing "some action" so I guess this makes sense.
We are most excited by the fact that so far, our allergic-to-chicken-eggs Isaac has shown no signs of being allergic to duck eggs. This was the original reason we got the ducks -- to hopefully allow him to eat duck eggs. I am not sure he'll ever get comfortable enough to sit down and eat an egg, but we can at least bake with them and use them in recipes interchangeably. Most people who are allergic to chicken eggs are not allergic to duck eggs. JB is slowly doing tests with him and today's test: putting the egg against his lip for 30 seconds was a success! A very good sign since if he touches his lip to a chicken egg his face blows up like a balloon!
We had just felt like we were hitting a bit of a wall with our ducks and geese. We have to move their pen frequently, and we aren't getting any benefit from them. So seeing eggs? A major pick-me-up!
1 comment:
This is amazing! I want to follow closely about Isaac and the duck eggs as my Nate is also allergic to eggs (along with 2 of my nieces). What do the duck eggs taste like? Pretty awesome to have a farmer Doctor daddy to try this stuff out with him!
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