A woman in the UK has hatched three ducklings from eggs she bought in a supermarket.
Charli Lello says hatching the ducklings - who were named Beep, Peep and Meep - was part of an experiment she conducted to help pass the time after becoming furloughed from her job due to the COVID-19 lockdown.
The 29-year-old from Hertfordshire told the BBC she got the idea after seeing a Facebook video of someone hatching quail eggs.
"While I was in Waitrose [supermarket], 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," she said.
"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."
After bringing the eggs home, Lello put them in an incubator. A month later, she heard faint cheeping sounds and saw the Braddock White ducklings emerge from their shells.
She said the ducklings would now live "a very happy life" with her pet chickens.
Lello told the BBC it was an "amazing" experience that only happened because she had so much time on her hands due to being furloughed.
A spokesperson for Waitrose told the BBC because it was "notoriously difficult" to identify the sex of egg-laying white-feathered ducks, males were sometimes left with groups of females and there were rare occasions where a female wild duck encountered a male drake.
Clarence Court Farms, where the eggs came from, told the BBC that while it was "not impossible" for ducklings to be hatched from its eggs, it was very rare.
"It is a feat of remarkably slim odds that a duckling has been hatched," the company said.
