Woman hatches three duckings from a carton of Waitrose eggs

During lockdown many of us may have taken up new hobbies, but one woman really went for it.

Charli Lello, 29, from Hertfordshire is currently on furlough, so she decided to use her free time to see whether she could rear some new pets.

Lello bought six eggs from Waitrose, and decided to try and hatch them at home after hearing of someone doing the same with supermarket quail's eggs.

She told the BBC:

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.

But it seems the eggs were sturdier than one might guess.

Lello popped them in an incubator and a month later she started to hear beeping noises. They were here!

She explained that it had been an "amazing experience", and that because she was furloughed, she would be able to look after the ducklings until they were old enough to be left alone.

Egg manufacturers typically try to "separate" male chickens at birth in order to avoid fertilisation, but a Waitrose spokesman told the BBC it was "notoriously difficult" to identify the sex of white-feathered ducks.

A fertilised egg is usually completely safe to eat, and you would never notice the difference, unless you were to put it in an incubator.

It seems Lello got lucky with her batch. She has named the three ducklings Beep, Peep and Meep.

If you want to try this at home, you can buy an egg incubator from Amazon for a pretty reasonable price. There are worse hobbies!