How to Make a Duckling Think You’re His Mom

My goal in life is to have a team of six ducklings that will always follow me because I think the girls will love it. I’ve tried walking with a parrot on my shoulder, wearing spats, and being an iguana super-lover and none of them have worked, but I have a good chance with ducklings. They are very cute.

Soon I’ll be able to walk into Starbucks with all these ducks and say, “Gimme a latte,” and the barista will say, “Name?” and I’ll be everything: “Just write Duck Boy, Sweets, everyone knows who I am.” (Baristas love it when you call them Sweets.)

Luckily for me, it’s very easy to make ducklings, goslings, and other chicks think you’re their mother. I am a man of action, so I follow the advice on imprinting from Antone Martigno-Truswell, co-founder of the Duck Lab at Oxford University, given by The New York Times , as well as other sources of information on imprinting from the Internet.

What to do before hatching duck eggs

Don’t just go down to your local farm or pond and wander around the ducks hoping they’ll start chasing you. It doesn’t work and the geese hate it ( they will bite you ). You need your own birds to rise from nothing, which means you’ll have to hatch a few eggs. But before doing so, consider the following:

• Do you really want a domestic duck? Pet ownership/parenthood is a big responsibility. Once a duck is completely imprinted on you, it is yours , for better or worse, for the rest of your life (or yours). You cannot return the fingerprint. You cannot pass it on to someone else. I will expand on the ethical aspects of the duck/human bond later, but be aware that this relationship is fraught with potential moral hazard.
• Is it legal to keep ducks where you live? Different states, counties, cities, and homeowner associations have different rules about which pets you can keep. Study yours before doing this.

If you’ve come to a personal understanding and acceptance of the weird interspecies relationship you’re about to enter into, and you’re sure it’s legal, here’s how to hatch your eggs!

How to hatch duckling eggs

• Get an incubator : Since you are incubating eggs without a mother duck sitting on them, you must carefully control the temperature and humidity of the environment. Hence the incubator. An incubator is basically a warm and humid box, so it’s not that hard to make one yourself, but I highly recommend buying one. Because capitalism is weird, consumer incubators are cheaper to buy than to buy parts to make yourself. They will cut down on a lot of work and are more likely to produce healthy ducklings. There are many incubators on the market. It has everything you need , including temperature and humidity sensors, a fan, egg flippers, and even candles for just $32. If you need to make your own incubator, I have included instructions for a DIY incubator at the end of this post, but that probably won’t work either.
• Take some eggs . You can buy mallard eggs online at very reasonable prices . In nature, mallards usually hatch nine to twelve eggs, but usually only two or three eggs survive the first month – nature is cruel. Because your ducklings will be pampered, well fed, and protected from predators by your human intelligence, you won’t have this problem once they’re born. Until then, expect around 50% success and buy twice as many eggs as you want followers. Even professionals who make a living hatching eggs only achieve about 80% success rate.
• Warm up the incubator. Turn on the box a day or two before the eggs arrive so you know it works, can maintain a stable temperature, and will be ready to go as soon as the eggs arrive. For mallard eggs, you need a temperature of 99.5°F and 55% humidity.
• Examine your eggs. Once your eggs are delivered, inspect them and light them – this means that you must illuminate them with a bright light. Your incubator may come with a candle; if it is not, you can use a strong flashlight. Don’t try to hatch cracked eggs, double yolk eggs, misshapen eggs, too big or small. Drop them instead.
• Put them in the incubator and wait. If you followed my advice and bought an incubator, it will handle all the tasks of egg turning, temperature and humidity control, and ventilation.
• Candle eggs again. About a week after starting the process, inspect the eggs again. Discard any clear or cloudy ones. Here are some pictures of healthy and unhealthy eggs to give you an idea. Other than that, you can leave your eggs alone.
• Enjoy a blessed Hatching Day!

Let’s start imprinting

Raising and caring for ducks is actually a difficult task, but there are plenty of resources to help you. Meanwhile, imprinting is not that difficult. Here are the steps to make sure your duckling friend/friends consider you their mom:

• Hang out with your ducklings constantly. Ducklings start looking for their mothers about 12-36 hours after they hatch from their little eggs, so make sure you’re there. The imprinting window lasts about two weeks, during which time you should spend as much time as possible with your ducklings.
• Make sure they can see you. Ducklings are mostly visual creatures, so stay in their line of sight as much as possible.
• Play them classical music. Studies have shown that classical music improves the ability to capture birds. (However, I’m going with Early Sabbath – I want my ducklings to be badass .)
• Keep adult ducks away. Ducks will print on things that are the shape and size of a duck if they can, but they will print well on you if there is no other choice. In fact, they imprint on almost anything – cats, dogs, and even inanimate objects if they move – so don’t feel special.
• Don’t wear yellow. Ducklings won’t easily imprint on yellow things, probably because ducklings are yellow and they have evolved not to think of their siblings as their mothers.
• Be consistent. During the 14-day imprint window, ducks can “switch” to different “mothers”, including cats and dogs or other humans. So make sure they only see you.
• Enjoy your eternal pet. If all goes well, by the end of two weeks your duck’s brain should be primed to see you as its mother. You, as the Oxford duck master Antone Martigno-Trouswell put it, “undertake what will treat you like your mother in the first year, and then like family for the rest of your life.” This is five to 10 years old.
• Print more ducklings. The number of ducklings that can be imprinted on them is not limited. I pick six because I’m a reasonable person, but there’s nothing in the rulebook that says you can’t be followed by hundreds or thousands of ducklings all the time! You can become the Master of Ducks! Wait, there are almost certainly local laws that limit the number of ducks you can have. I’m sorry, Lord of the Ducks.

Long-term effects of the human-duck bond

In their first year of life, your ducklings will treat you like a parent; then, like human children, your duck pals will grow up. But they will still depend on you. Congratulations, genius, you now have hundreds of ducks to take care of until they die (or until you cook and eat them ).

On the plus side, ducks are good laying hens and their eggs are delicious. On the negative side, there is basically everything else. According to wildlife experts and duck lovers , ducks with a human print identify with humans for the rest of their lives. They are not normal. They won’t be able to communicate with their duck peers and probably won’t join the pack. Instead, they will depend on you and any friends and family you have left for all social interaction and stimulation. You will have to keep them safe, feed and entertain them. They, in turn, will sometimes quack. These ducks think they’re human, but they’re just confused ducks – not even domesticated animals like cats and dogs, but wild animals that can’t be truly wild. It’s a nightmarish, cruel, and unnatural life if you think about it, and if you believe that ducks can feel humanly. If they could talk, they might ask, “Why did you do this to me?”

Morals and ethics aside, raising and caring for adult ducks is not a picnic (unless you choose to cook and eat them – then it could very well be a picnic!). These are pets that require special care. They poop a lot and violently . They poop every 15-30 minutes . You (probably) can’t tame ducks. You can only get them to wear duck diapers, which are a lot less adorable than they look. Of the benefits, if it doesn’t work out, then again they can be cooked and eaten .

Ultimately, making a duck print on you can be beneficial if you’re in the business of raising ducks, but for the average person, it’s morally questionable, time consuming, and a huge headache. However, I won’t let that stop me. I have a dream. A dream and hopefully soon ducklings.

As promised, if you must create your own incubator, here’s how:

How to make a fancy incubator with your own hands.

Janky, accessories for a homemade incubator:

• Aquarium 20 liters
• Duck tape (of course.)
• A piece of plexiglass covering the opening of the aquarium.
• small lamp
• Bulbs of different power – old school, not LED. They are a heating element.
• Bread mold
• Sponge
• At least two accurate thermometers
• hygrometer (sensor that measures temperature)

P.S.: How to make a flimsy homemade incubator

• Place the aquarium on a sturdy table away from direct sunlight or any heat sources, but close to a power outlet.
• Turn the aquarium on its side.
• Cut a sheet of plexiglass wider than the opening of the aquarium and tape it along the top edge. You need a band “hinge” so that you can open and close the door when needed.
• Insert lamp. The cord can just go through the door.
• Hang up your hygrometer.
• Hang thermometers evenly throughout the incubator so you can read them from the outside – the idea is to average the temperature across different parts of the incubator to get a more accurate reading.
• Place a damp sponge in a bread pan.
• Turn on the lamp and wait until the thermometers take a reading. Change the light bulbs and wet the sponge until you reach 99.5°F and 55% humidity.
• You will have to constantly monitor this temperature and humidity throughout the hatching process.
• Don’t do any of this. Buy an incubator instead.

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