Goslings and Incubation

Goslings are the messiest, most ungangly little things... We have White Chinese. We like them for their appetite. Yes, we want geese for weeding, though we have yet to use them as such. At this point we're just trying to figure out how best to propagate them, as odd as that sounds.

These one were incubated and hatched by a friend of ours. There were 7 (out of 14) but two died for no real apparent reason. One he thinks got on it's back and died, the other, he has no clue. He's been raising waterfowl for some time and knows what he's doing but as he says, he's still learning. He's also the only one who's been able to hatch our waterfowl successfully. I don't have an incubator built yet to even try. I've been too busy with everything else. So we sent 12 more goose eggs and 60 Silver Appleyard duck eggs to him when we picked up these goslings. Hopefully they go well and we get ducklings and more goslings.

I do know we both use dry incubation methods. What does that mean? It means, you keep the incubator humidity down around 50% rather than the regularly recommended 80%. The eggs NEED to evaporate liquid out of them or the baby inside will drown in it's own fluids. By the time they're ready to hatch they should've lost around 40% of their liquid. Now at hatching time you do want higher humidity so shells don't stick, something like 70%.

But I digress...

P.S. I made some adjustments to their watering and feed. They are staying much drier and cleaner. The big adjustment was putting a small cake pan under their waterer. Ducks and geese are horribly sloppy with their water when cleaning their beaks...