Translucent Duck Eggs With Black Mass Inside

Prince and Pavo

Songster
Apr 4, 2023
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Hello! I recently found five duck eggs that I am incubating. I am almost 100% sure that the mom was no longer sitting on them, but I thought I would try to incubate them anyway. They are all pretty small and have relatively translucent shells, so you can sort of see inside of them without candling. A couple have black masses inside, and one of those has a reddish ring around the air cell. I’m assuming they are both dead? All the eggs were found in the same nest, so would that mean that they are all dead? Here are some pics, each of an individual egg:
Egg 1:
9B6D63D0-3144-4013-A4D1-61EB461D181A.jpeg
Egg 2:
8A977BCB-4A33-4306-9E15-9414B2EB3E0B.jpeg
Egg 3:
5DA3BC09-5444-4946-B5F4-CB7D103FC40C.jpeg
Egg 4:
8F0E936F-02FA-47E0-BB56-7C0D5D850800.jpeg
Egg 5:
ADA7310D-E784-47F8-A610-415B2EFFCC84.jpeg
Eggs 2 and 3 are the ones with black inside. You can’t really see that they are very translucent but you could definitely tell if you saw them in person.
 
So sorry, I was just now able to get some pics of the eggs being candled. I forgot the order that I had them in for the last pics, so I can’t really label them anymore LOL. If you have something to say about a specific egg, just refer to it as “the egg in the ____ (eg. 2nd) picture” or simply “the ____ (eg. 2nd) egg/picture”. EE59977C-54B8-490E-9E42-CBF31A59AA73.jpeg 2926C391-BBAD-42DC-B336-BBE4001A09F2.jpeg 322AB1F7-1210-4D4D-8AEA-81CA08DD1696.jpeg C1EE4428-A0CC-44A4-AC0B-BD1205D01F5F.jpeg 0BB7B0E3-6827-46E7-A4E6-264844541310.jpeg
 
Only pic 2 looks like it could possibly be still viable unfortunately. 1 and 3 look like development stopped and 4 and 5 look like they had never started development. Could you see any movement when candling?
 
They look it yes apart from egg 2 but if you can’t see movement in it that likely isn’t going to hatch either. The mother could have abandoned the nest knowing her eggs were no longer viable.
 
Okay, thanks for your responses. I decided to just go ahead and get rid of all of them since they probably wouldn’t hatch anyway, and I replaced them with six eggs that I had under my broody buff Orpington hen. Sadly she was killed last night by a coyote because she decided to set outside of the chicken yard/run. The coyote also ate 5 of the 11 eggs, but hopefully these ones will hatch :fl
 

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