Monday morning we come in early, take them out and then start to get them ready for shipping.
So I think we've got some that have started to hatch and we'll show you those.
When they're inside there they make a little break, they turn and break, turn and break,
and once they make a complete revolution in there then they push and they pop that open
and then they push themselves out.
So a correctly hatched egg has that lid on it so to speak.
With the light and our speaking that's stimulating these guys to move and to come closer to me
since I'm talking and they're wondering are you my mother?
When I went to college my interest was with research with large animals.
I imagine myself being a researcher at a university with cattle or hogs or sheep but
coincidentally my father had ducks as a hobby, just a small number and a gentleman from Los
Angeles came to him at one point and said that he would like to buy 40,000 duck eggs
a month from my father.
Well that was an astronomical number to him but it got me thinking about the potential
of duck eggs.
So I graduated in four years but I shifted from large animal research to duck and goose
hatchery business and I've been at it ever since, that was 1978, 30 years ago.
This evolved quite a bit since then from a large hobby where it started out to many different
breeds of ducks and geese and selling breeding stock to other duck farms and selling blown
eggs and all the other little products that go along with it.
All we use in our home are our duck eggs.
There's more proteins, there's more vitamins, there's more minerals, more cholesterol.
The easiest way to say it is they're more condensed with nutrients.
Taste-wise there's a bit of a taste difference, it's more of a texture difference.
There's people that buy from us because they're allergic to chicken eggs and they can eat
duck eggs.
There are some people that buy from us because they like them for baking.
A lady came to the hatchery wanting some duck eggs.
She was a bit hesitant and we asked her why she wanted these duck eggs and she said well
they're for my husband.
The way she said it and her embarrassment of acknowledging that there had been a problem
was that I'm sure it had some kind of sexual performance concerns.
We sold her the eggs, that's no problem to us.
The funny part was that a week later her husband came very proudly to the door and wanted some
more.
We saw them for probably a month or six weeks on a regular basis and I guess we helped them
work things out and we haven't seen them since.
It was a story that had a happy ending.
