The Hardest Ducklings to Keep Alive

so every year we have Mandarin ducklings hatching and it seems that every year something seems to go wrong well not the first year all six eggs hatched what do you guys got there a duck a dick maybe this [Music] but in 2020 it was salt our white Mandarin losing her only duckling to hatch last year it was a wonderful hatch but after some of the ducklings couldn't jump out of the nesting box it died before we could save them so this year I made a different plan let's try letting the parents raise some and a coup by themselves without the other Ducks around let's try moving some into a brooder right after they hatched and let's take all the risk out of the way and hatch some in an incubator they all had different outcomes so we've got to start at the beginning remember when they laid eggs all the way back in January oh boy yeah like still cold outside January well that never ends well we move those eggs into the incubator and nothing well off to a bad start that is not good so that was rough one out of 13 and the one doesn't even look great so right now I'm left with one egg from the first group and that's six more that have been laid over the past week so unfortunately I'm gonna have to get rid of those eggs I wish I would have caught that sooner I had no idea that they were laying in January that's that's nuts but hopefully we get something from these remaining seven and I think they're still going to keep laying so we'll probably get a few more eggs over the next few days unfortunately nothing has from our January February or March this one is not good even though it's dark yolk exploded or something just too cold when we collected them but the Ducks were sitting on eggs in April so there was a tree all right it was April 21st I think something should be hatching here pretty soon let's see what we've got going one two three four five six seven eight nine very close to 15 eggs down there now we'll just have to see what hatches now here in our other Mandarin Coupe we have another duck sitting on eggs and she just started about a week ago so they've got about three weeks ago so we've been waiting a long time this is the most exciting day of the year for a bird farmer is when they're exotic birds that only hatch once a year finally start to hatch so exciting today is that day we have two coops here we've got some eggs here I think we've got about 15 or so here and then right next door we've got I think seven or eight that they're starting to sit on now we've been checking on salt and our eggs nearly every day and May 13th we finally found some broken eggs in the nesting box seeing a bunch of babies that is exciting definitely see some babies down in there but really yeah there's some like two standard ones around her [Music] still [Music] hissing and stuff so I I yeah we're going to but I want to make sure although I'll hatch because I don't want to like jump out and then abandon so we've got an idea of how we can have the mama with her babies and not have to take them away from them that's how a lot of them ended up dead last year was the weather went cold and we weren't sure what the other Ducks were doing and we need a space to move her into or maybe move the other Ducks into we could leave her alone I could just leave her in there and catch the other mandarins and move the other mandarins right over here I need this Coop cleared out we have the hook bills in here and we've been doing a hook Bill hatching project we've hatched out in five hook bills so far this year so we're gonna move these hook bills down to the Palm we're trying to keep from doing that because we wanted to protect these four our breeders but we're gonna move them for a little bit just so we could have them in here foreign a duck yeah so we've got them spread out now all right we got our Coop set up now let's catch some Mandarin ducks to move over so salt is on the eggs and then her mate airmail is back there so we're gonna leave the one pear in here and then move the three other mandarins over there there's male number one about the only way to catch these guys is in the air sometimes so we've got three moved over we have the one pair in here so now hopefully it'll be a little safer when the babies come out it's gonna be a lot warmer than last year hoping we can work this out where the parents will be able to hang out with the baby so the babies hatched over the last day and Mama's out now so she's trying to call to him to get him to come out normally the mom jumps out and then sometimes in the next 24 hours the baby's follower and jump out as well it might be a little bit too far for them so I want to make sure that they're able to get out or a little white baby so we've got four white Mandarin babies we've got three standard color I'm trying this as an experiment to see if the mama can take care of her baby since we separate out all the other Ducks hopefully this works out all right really wet out here today we got some cold little babies so we're getting some some hay down still have all of them they're all surviving and luckily ducks are a wet bird but they are still babies so we don't want them getting too cold you guys are all right got the babies there got one here hopefully they all survive the day but we're doing the best we can to try to keep them warm in here and not separate them from their parents so I hope we're not too late we had to leave this morning for a little while and just watch it on the camera and there's one little white Mandarin duckling that struggling not moving up with the others and it's the survival of the fittest and Nature's Nature's cruel nature says I'll take the strongest and help them survive and man I hope she's still alive the baby dead [Music] I think the baby's dead we'll be there it's really not alive nope so we've had really warm weather the last couple of days so I wasn't too worried about these ducklings yesterday but got a little cooler last night in the 50s 60s this morning and wet and rainy made for a bad combination for salt to try to keep her ducklings alive with animals it's the strongest that get to survive I'm sorry little one I thought we were gonna make it back in time [Music] so I thought the white man and parents could take care of these seven Mandarin ducklings the four white mandarins and the three standards and we've had two more whites die in the last day we have another Dead one here I've got to take them away so I've got to get those for and get them out of here I would have loved for that to have worked out but it did not all right well I just put the little white Mandarin inside already you know I've got some pheasants that are right in here I might try that first this might be a little calmer at first until they get a little bigger there's our last little white Mandarin baby part of this group this is the most frustrating thing sometimes you think you have it figured out or you found a way to to keep the babies with their parents and and then it just doesn't want to work out for you it's it's frustrating so right now we have the four Mandarin babies in here and we have three pheasants that hatched out in the last couple days they're all really tiny they're running around panicking because they're not with their parents I hope and so if they make it till the morning pheasants are cool mandarins are freaking out gonna be a full house in here so in the last day or two I had two hook builds hatch out one Mandarin and two or three pheasants so far and we have another Mandarin hatching house on the last day I've had these two hook bills and a standard Mandarin has hatched out this was an egg that was collected a while ago that they weren't sitting on and then we have one more egg that we're gonna come in and watch hatch and that's one of the eggs from after salt got off those eggs and the rest were put into the incubator all right buddy so in here we've got all of our McMurray chicks and we've got some ducks in there there's our Mandarin ducks that hatch and they're doing great is one of our mandarins there's our little baby so these guys are probably oh gosh these guys are probably about two weeks old now and then there's our day old Mandarin that just hatched they grow really quick and they are hard to hang on to they want to jump out of my hand here you don't know but now we have one more Mandarin hatching out inside and then after that one's done hopefully we'll be ready for those eight eggs to hatch out out in the chicken tractor ah this was so amazing to watch and I've watched a lot of mandarins hatch out before but I've never seen a little pheasant chick come over like this snuggle up to a mandarin duckling as it's hatching so cute all right guys ready to go to the brooder let's go hey there's a little Mandarin this guy took forever to hatch out I'm so glad this little pheasant I was actually pretty mad at all the other pheasants I hatched out we had seven hatch out that night and they were picking had this little Mandarin because he was hatching and so I had to move them out into the brooder but this guy was a good little companion so now they'll go out and join the other pheasant so deck be cute yes because now I believe we have five standard mandarins and two white mandarins with our last Mandarin Coop and the eight eggs waiting to hatch so we'll let them hang out in there and hopefully we'll have some more mandarins to join that little one soon do you remember our white pea chicks that hatched this year well two of them hatched at the same time as another standard colored Mandarin devil there you go all right let's take you to the brooder and then it was finally time for the second nesting box to start hatching those females are out let's see what's going on should be all right oh she's trying to defend him you got anything oh we got babies [Music] we got babies I don't know we're gonna have to probably get them out I think they just hatched oh my goodness thank goodness I thought this was the end I didn't think these eggs were gonna hatch I see three eggs left I'm hoping we have five then hopefully and they're all standards we'll check these guys in the morning I'm gonna let him sleep in here tonight and then we'll move them into the brooder so our babies made it out of their their nesting box last night and look how cute they are it's a little [Music] now we're not going to make the same mistake we made with the first group we're going to try to let the parents raise them and it just did not go well so we're gonna have to move these guys right into the brooder [Music] got a mandarin yeah okay hold them carefully there you go [Music] let's go take them to the brooder we've got a couple little mandarins we've got these five and then the rest are actually going to go into that Coop of our adult males we're going to move some of those mandarins around just to make room some of the baby ducks from this year oh you did it okay get your hands over the wings get your hands over the wings get your hands over the wings right did it oh no no hold that leg hold those legs there you go all right hold tight hold tight please and our last pretty female she might be the one that just hatched them out because she hasn't lost any feathers yet so then we got those Mandarin Ducks out and we can get all the other little baby ducks into here and that includes a bunch of mandarins check these guys she was our first one to hatch out this year and it was and it was like in March so this one's like two almost three months old now so we've got five hook bills one Mandarin there let's go get a whole bunch of the next batch of mandarins the hot sauce these mandarins these are the ones that you saw hatch out and a couple of their white Mandarin siblings had passed away in the coop and we moved them into here they've done great of our little hook bills super cute a little Mandarin here's our second oldest white Mandarin from the Sierra [Music] and then they're my little mandarins and hook bills so now they have a lot more space to move around oh it is four months later after these mandarins have hatched out and they have totally grown up every one of these ones that we hatched out this year outside of maybe one female we may keep as a backup we're gonna end up shipping them out and selling them to our viewers and so we've got some shipping boxes here I thought you might like to see these so we have these boxes that you can ship birds in so this one's for two birds and then this box right here I had gotten our four white mandarins in we're gonna ship three birds out in this today but let's go see what these ducks look like now I can't wait to show you all right so these are the male and females that we're going to send these are a standard pair so you can see the color already comes in after three four months they are fully colored so we've been shipping a few pairs over the last few weeks we're getting our last few pairs shipped out I think we'll have one extra if there's anybody out there that still wants a pair this year so we take this box then go in here these two guys will just have to make it about one to two days to their destination so we fold this box in they have ventilation on the side so we'll put a couple of zip ties on these two ends so these guys will be on their way so now we're going to catch the white pair we've got somebody that wants the white pair they need an extra female so here is our white Mandarin pair and then uriah's got our standard female here don't these guys look just amazing with this this golden brown color this is the male the females are all white you guys look great and they're ready to go into the box a little scary getting these guys all packaged up wrapped up ready to go so it's a little scary until we get these guys all taped and zip tied so we don't want them to pop out of this box on the way to the vehicle all right so we've got these packages all ready to ship I'm excited about that it's always a nerve-wracking thing because you hope that they make them there safely and if they don't we don't have any to replace it with so I know I'm gonna have a few questions I wanted to address a few things why didn't we move ducklings that first hatched out that were with their parents salt and airmail and we really thought if we had just the two parents they would do fine they got hit by a rainstorm storm we thought they'd be okay because Ducks get wet but a couple of them were just they were just a little too weak and they didn't survive the first couple days and that was that was super disappointing but some of you are going to say well if you just moved to the brooder they would have survived I didn't get it filmed but we had three standard ducklings that we moved to the brooder after one of the hatchings I think some that were in the incubator and they end up dying in the first couple days like three or four standard ducklings and so both ways resulted in some loss but we're so excited for the ones that ended up making it and that will make some people really happy we are so excited to see our mandarins in the Aviary maybe a few months left to go so we'll keep working on that see you guys next time [Music] [Applause] can we hold you [Music] say bye

Channel: White House on the Hill

Views: 149,859

Keywords: White House on the Hill, Mandarin ducks, hatching Mandarins, ducklings

Id: vY6h0xfla04

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 04 2022