Summary: Duck eggs are hatched by hens, don't ducks incubate eggs?
This question is very interesting, I believe that many friends who have raised chickens and ducks know that the duck eggs in the general home are to be hatched by the old hen, remember when I was a child, my own ducks were hatched by the old hens, and they were also raised by the mother chickens. So why not let the ducks incubate their own eggs? Let's look at this problem here.
Do ducks incubate eggs?
There is an old saying in the countryside called "hens hold nests, female geese hold nests, only female ducks do not hold nests", so will ducks really not incubate eggs? The answer, of course, is no, wouldn't ducks have become extinct long ago if they hadn't hatched their eggs? How can we still see ducks now? In fact, only domestically bred ducks do not incubate eggs, and wild ducks still incubate eggs. There should be many friends who have seen wild ducks, wild ducks are ducks that have not been domesticated by humans, they are the same as pheasants and wild birds that survive in the wild, they will build their own nests and hatch small ducks. And why don't our domestic ducks incubate their eggs?
In fact, this is mainly the result of human domestication of ducks, ducks this kind of poultry are also wild at the earliest, and then gradually domesticated by people into poultry, in the process of domestication people will collect duck eggs to eat, so ducks generally nest is not stored in the duck eggs, ducks will contact the opportunity to contact duck eggs will become less, in general, ducks are only responsible for laying duck eggs, and hatching work people generally do not let ducks carry out. Because in the process of duck hatching duck eggs, the time is relatively long, generally it takes 28 days, so that the female duck will stop laying eggs during egg incubation, and the weight will also decrease, which will affect people to eat duck eggs and duck meat.
Therefore, people often put duck eggs in the eggs hatched by the hens to hatch together, so that not only can save the time of the hen duck hatching but also increase the egg production of the hen duck, and the hen can not distinguish the egg and the duck egg, and the hatched duck hen will lead the growth, so that the hen hatches the duck egg has become a good thing to kill two birds with one stone, and over time people will form the habit of letting the hen hatch the duck egg, and the domestic duck will also form such a habit. So domestic ducks don't hatch eggs is a situation that is believed to have changed the habits of ducks after domestication.
In addition to the artificial domestication reasons, the reason why people use hens to hatch ducklets is that ducks hold nests every year, that is, the number of incubations is relatively small, while the number of hens is relatively more. And the time for the hen to hatch the duck egg is shorter, so people prefer to use the hen to hatch the duck egg. When I was a child, I heard my grandmother say that because the time of duck incubation is generally in the summer, the weather is hot, and the female duck suffers, so the female duck is not allowed to incubate the egg, and I don't know if this is true.
Jilin Jiangnan Park hens hatched 60 peacocks and became "surrogate mothers"
Of course, it is not impossible for ducks to incubate eggs, but it also takes a certain amount of time to domesticate and cultivate, so few people will experiment with female ducks to incubate eggs.
Here is the science of rejuvenation, welcome to add attention, take you along with long knowledge.