Do any of you know a reputable place to buy call ducklings this time of year?

[JadeComputerGal]

It's no problem at all. Calls are wonderful birds and one of my personal favorite breeds to keep. (Minus the noise level of course. lol). I completely understand your reasoning. My first Call was actually already an adult when I got her but tamed quite well. I think she might have been an exception though because most of my adult birds never tamed well.

I FOUND SOME! I'M SO EXCITED!!!

They will be six months old when we receive them in October, one show pair and one breeding pair each of white and blue fawn.The waiting is going to drive me out of my mind, but it will give us time to get their separate house and pen set up and to rehome the ducks/ducklings we already had for sale.

If I could ask your (or someone's) advice, I've read in several places that calls are hard to breed and most are very reluctant to sit on their eggs. Is that true? If so, I'm leaning toward keeping my "mama" buff. She is an excellent mother and actually doesn't seem to want to do anything but be a mother. If the call hens wouldn't sit on their nests, would the buff be an option, or would she be too heavy for call eggs and potentially crush them?

I know I'm going to have more questions and hope I don't drive everyone crazy. I do tons of reading, but I always find conflicting information on things. When I come here, I know at least one person will be able to give me an accurate answer.

Thanks again!!!

 

[Kevin565]

I FOUND SOME! I'M SO EXCITED!!!

They will be six months old when we receive them in October, one show pair and one breeding pair each of white and blue fawn.The waiting is going to drive me out of my mind, but it will give us time to get their separate house and pen set up and to rehome the ducks/ducklings we already had for sale.

If I could ask your (or someone's) advice, I've read in several places that calls are hard to breed and most are very reluctant to sit on their eggs. Is that true? If so, I'm leaning toward keeping my "mama" buff. She is an excellent mother and actually doesn't seem to want to do anything but be a mother. If the call hens wouldn't sit on their nests, would the buff be an option, or would she be too heavy for call eggs and potentially crush them?

I know I'm going to have more questions and hope I don't drive everyone crazy. I do tons of reading, but I always find conflicting information on things. When I come here, I know at least one person will be able to give me an accurate answer.

Thanks again!!!

 

[Going Quackers]

I FOUND SOME! I'M SO EXCITED!!!

They will be six months old when we receive them in October, one show pair and one breeding pair each of white and blue fawn.The waiting is going to drive me out of my mind, but it will give us time to get their separate house and pen set up and to rehome the ducks/ducklings we already had for sale.

If I could ask your (or someone's) advice, I've read in several places that calls are hard to breed and most are very reluctant to sit on their eggs. Is that true? If so, I'm leaning toward keeping my "mama" buff. She is an excellent mother and actually doesn't seem to want to do anything but be a mother. If the call hens wouldn't sit on their nests, would the buff be an option, or would she be too heavy for call eggs and potentially crush them?

I know I'm going to have more questions and hope I don't drive everyone crazy. I do tons of reading, but I always find conflicting information on things. When I come here, I know at least one person will be able to give me an accurate answer.

Thanks again!!!

I had 3 broody hens this past year only two sat, one didn't do so great so i lost a few eggs and i had to help some and got 3 imprinted on me lol the other mama? she was great and produced 5 babies and raised them to several weeks old.. she still spends time with them though has moved back to the 'adult' coop. SO the only thing i can say on that is varies by bird.



In my experience a buff is not a broody duck, i had mine go off but they gave up.. they seemed to rather play at it.. personally i would opt for the calls first and then an incubator.. vs a buff due to the VERY delicate nature of a call baby, if you could get a silkie chicken that may work.. they go broody on nothing -trust me-

 

[JadeComputerGal]

Quackers, I so much appreciate the input from both you and Kevin. As you could tell, I already had reservations about keeping Sophia because I was afraid she'd be too big to sit on call eggs. It's just that she's an incredibly good mother. She still attacks us if we mess with the ducklings even though they're four weeks old today. She jumped up and bit my hubby on the butt one day when he bent over to get the little drake to change his leg band, and if we pick up any of the ducklings for any reason, she takes to the air to get to us and bites us on the arms until we put it down. That's actually the only time I've ever seen her fly, but I guess she's motivated by mothering instincts. Fortunately, duck bites don't hurt at all, but I don't think she's learned that

I'm not into the incubator thing. I've never done it before, and I'm afraid I wouldn't do it correctly even if I bought one of the high-end ones that does everything but make your coffee in the morning. I have looked at them, and I guess I could be convinced otherwise, but I'd be traumatized if I felt like I'd done something wrong that killed our babies. I've read the same things Kevin's read about calls not being easy to incubate. I also talked with a breeder recently who told me he had 160 eggs in incubators last spring and only got around 40 viable hatchlings out of all that. That made me very nervous about incubating. I'm at least going to try the natural way to see what happens. I'm hoping that, out of four hens, at least one or two will go broody. It's so much more fun to watch the hens sit on them and roll them around periodically than to just look at eggs sitting in an incubator!

If worse comes to worst, I'll try to convince the hubby on the silkie. He's a wonderful man who will go along with almost anything that makes me happy, but he has put his foot down on chickens. He grew up on a chicken farm and worked on it since he was 6 or 7 years old, and he's said more than once that he never wants to see a living chicken again as long as he lives. When I brought up the subject again last spring, we were standing outside and he just looked up at the sky. I waited a few seconds, then said, "Are you praying?" and he said, "No, I'm counting to 100." A chicken is going to be a very hard sell

 

[JadeComputerGal]

Hubby was in a great mood this morning, as he usually is. I thought it might be a good time to discuss potential hatching scenarios with him so I'd have some time to work on it, especially since he brought up babies and hatching and keeping Sophia for hatching in case the Calls didn't go broody. I explained to him that people on this board had seconded my reservations about Sophia being too heavy, so he said that meant we'd just have to get an incubator even though we agreed long ago that artificial incubation wasn't our preference.

I did get at least part of the way through my sentence. "Well, since we've always agreed we want to do natural hatching, if the Calls won't go broody, there is another option. The people on BYC have suggested that the next best option would be..."

That's as far as I got before the, "Oh, no. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO! YOU ARE ABOUT TO SAY THE C WORD! I CAN FEEL THE C WORD COMING. DO NOT SAY THE C WORD!" Then he went outside to work on modifcations to the pen and house.

Boy do I hope we get at least a couple of broody Calls. He told me a good while back that he's never seen a Silkie chicken, but I seriously doubt I could buy one and convince him it's an exotic breed of duck