Hertfordshire woman hatches ducks from store-bought eggs

Tribune Web Desk

Chandigarh, June 14

Charli Lello, a 29-year-old woman from Hertfordshire, England, has hatched three ducklings called Beep, Peep and Meep from eggs she bought in Waitrose, the BBC reported.

Lello said she put the Clarence Court eggs she bought from a store in an incubator to experiment with to pass her time after being furloughed.

She also owns a few pet chickens and believes the ducklings will live “a very happy life” with them.

A Waitrose spokesman said fertilised eggs were safe to eat and “entirely indistinguishable” from normal eggs unless incubated, the BBC further reported.

Charli Lello works as an assistant manager in a shop. She said she got the idea to experiment with the eggs after coming across a video on Facebook of someone hatching quail eggs bought from a supermarket.

“While I was in Waitrose, I saw the duck eggs and thought maybe they would work as well. I was so excited for them to hatch but I still had in the back of my mind that these are supermarket eggs. They have been collected, bashed around on a delivery truck, then rattled around on a trolley onto a shelf, picked up and put down by who knows how many people, so they still might not go all the way,” Lello said.

It was a month after putting the eggs in the incubator that Lello noticed a tiny beeping sound and the Braddock White ducklings started to emerge from their shells.

She said it had been an “amazing” experience hatching the “cutest little balls of fluff” but she would not be repeating it.

“The only reason I could try it was because I am currently furloughed and have the time to raise them to an age where they won’t need me all day. Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t have been possible or fair on them,” Lello said.

A Waitrose spokesman said it was “notoriously difficult” to identify the sex of white-feathered ducks, the BBC reported

“Our farmers work hard to ensure ducks and drakes are separated correctly. As a result of this difficulty in sexing, a male white-feathered duck may very occasionally be left with a group of females, although, these instances are extremely rare. There may also be instances when a wild duck encounter farmed drakes, but again, this is rare,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Clarence Court Farms said: “It is a feat of remarkably slim odds that a duckling has been hatched. But we acknowledge that it’s not impossible.”