If you've been convinced by Christine, Duncan Ducks, and the author of Raising Ducks for Beginners and Beyond, to raise ducks like I pretty much have, then this is going to be a great episode. We're talking about duck links. So incubating duck eggs and even how to rear them from duck, duck links. And I think that's what I would do if I was going to do this, you know, with chickens,

Christine I raised from day-old chicks instead of like going the pullet route with like a four, six-week-old hen.

And so to me it was really rewarding obviously like somewhat time consuming but also really rewarding and is that how you typically do it?

Do you go from duck eggs or do you go from ducklings?

It really depends. I'm about a 50-50 split on whether I hatch my own eggs or I bring in new stock which I usually start with ducklings because I always want more colors.

And when you do that, where are you sourcing from most of the time? Someone local?

So I have pretty much always gotten my ducks somewhere different, which is partially because I want you know different genetics

within my flock because I do every once in a while hatch my own eggs and I don't want to I know

technically it's line breeding with ducks and it's not as bad as true in breeding, but I want a wide genetic pool.

So I, I had, most recently I got some call ducklings from Metzer Farms.

I've gotten a lot of ducklings from just you know individual breeders local

breeders faraway breeders all kinds of things. The one thing I don't really

buy them from farm stores though because then they won't be sex and I

Definitely do not want too many male ducks because they will not treat your female ducks too kindly

We hear the stories.

We probably can't even mention the exact mechanisms here,

but it's pretty brutal in duck reproduction world, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely.

I say you should get at least a minimum of three females for every one male, but some males will require a lot more females.

The alpha ducks. Yeah. Yeah, crazy. Um, easy to sex ducklings? Because sometimes it depends on the breed for

hence, like some of them you really can't for a while and some of them you can pretty quickly.

So there's I think only like maybe one or two sex links duck breeds.

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