First Hatch

Your hatch must be finishing up now. How'd thing pan out? We're the two sets of hatching eggs from different sources-as in different locations? If you note a big difference in hatch rate and they came from different locations it's a fair indication of where bad postal lanes are to you. You know, if the welsumer hatched 50% and Legbar 10% then don't order hatching eggs from anywhere that would travel same direction to you. It's an idea anyway.

As for our hatch I'm not sure how to calculate it. Huge infertility problem. If I count everything that started to develop then I did well, if I count everything I set it would be a disaster. But in reality you can't count what's not even fertile. DOh! Should have checked that before collecting for incubation. Never even considered it considering there are too many cockerels and 11 month old pullets with full sized eggs. Live and learn. Always something new to discover to later avoid. One chick has been out since 3 this morning and kept me up chirping. Since he fluffed up in incubator and others were piped when I got out of bed left it in and set up brooder awaiting another to hatch before putting both in brooder. 5 hours later both unhatched but mostly zipped shells. The only viable three from day 10 are hatching. Of all others set only one wasn't clear. Small cloudy swirl which indicates it quit day two maybe. Solid guess is only had 4 fertile eggs total. I'll chalk it up as 66.6% and very small sample size. It ruins my personal eggs hatching rate numbers but what can you do with 4 fertile eggs. Happy with the three.

Photos to come.

We have had 15 hatch. I broke two early. I just dissected four eggs that were either early quitters or never started. I have a few more in the incubator yet that I cannot yet commit to dissecting. I tried the float test and honestly I can't tell you what it means. None of them were high floaters or sinkers. I suspect they died late but I'm not sure if I should open them yet or not. This is day 23. So I started with 26 and broke two. That's 24. 15 live. That's about 60%. So that's not bad. I think I've got four male cream legbars and three females. I'm pretty sure I only have one male welsummer and the rest are females. I know that you will never get the perfect proportion. At least I got one of each lol. If all goes well maybe I can hatch another batch from my own if I get the heat right.

60% is good with shipped eggs. Unless you know of somethig that may have gone wrong everything you did is spot on. It's just the way shipped eggs are. Like I said earlier; last spring I got 70% hatch on shipped eggs and was elated about it. If you hatch with local eggs or eggs from these birds next spring you'll easily see 90% and more hatch rates. Just remember to verify fertility first. LOL.


Morning wait...

And the reward.