Chook Me!

Can we hatch our duck egg without an incubator?

My friend and i just found an egg in the lake sitting on a ple of brush there was no mother in sight and it was cold outside so we decided to bring it home. We made a box with a towel and the egg is under a lamp to keep it warm. We were wondering if we would be able to hatch the egg. We think that it is a duck egg but it is quite small and has a green blue tinge to it.

Public Comments

1. sounds like a duck egg to me, I would contact a local animal rescue sanctuary, that would give you a best chance of survival for the potential duck. I used to take in bird eggs but I had an incubator. The bad news is that if you found it abandoned and it was cold im afraid the embryo is no longer viable. You could have success if its in a box under a heat lamp,but it is quite unlikely good luck!
2. Duck eggs generally need to be incubated at 37.5 C with a humidity of 45%. To hatch eggs successfully, you really need an incubator. It rarely happens just using a lamp. The eggs also need to turned every two hours. You can try building an incubator (there are many instructions for building one on the internet) and turning the egg manually. Sometimes people have been successful, but you would be better off taking the bird to a wildlife centre.
3. Ducks lay eggs that are infertile all the time, just like chicken. So don't get excited.
4. im not an expert but ive done research: no u can not unless you have the mother hen or another hen to keep it warm but im not sure so keep trying =) hope i helped -alexa<33
5. It's still unlikely it would work, and it may not even be fertilized, so that's probably why it was left there, and there's a lot more too it than keeping it warm, especially because you don't know how old it is, you won't know when it will hatch, a few days before it hatches you have to raise the humidity to make the shell softer, but also because you don't have an incubator to turn the eggs slowly, the baby can stick to one side of the egg and come out deformed, or may not be able to hatch, if it's not turned.
6. You should have left the egg where it was, the pile of brush was the nest, the mother duck doesn't sit on the eggs until she has laid all the eggs, usually about 10 or 11 then she sits on them and then they start to develop, it wouldn't have mattered that it was cold the egg doesn't develop into a duckling until the female duck starts to incubate. This egg won't hatch I'm sorry to say, all eggs need specific temperature and humidity and need to be turned several times a day and night. You either need an incubator or a broody hen to hatch eggs successfully. Next time try not to interfere in nature.
7. Sorry ,but quite simply ,it would not hatch ,no matter how warm you keep it.or even what kind of egg it is. The reasons being that it was cold when you found it ,you do not know how long it had been lying there,and you would need an incubator,you can not hatch eggs with a heat lamp.