Why are my chicks dying

Hi,

I'm new to chickens. We've had them for about 2.5 years and now starting to breed them, well one rooster has 11 hens to pick from.

We'll only use a brooding hen and the first group has started to hatch. The first one hatched like a pro and very healthy. About a day later others started. Two fully hatched and we found them dead the next day as they hatched in the night, another started to come through the shell and just dyed while in the process.

What I find odd is the one made the pip Sunday am and did nothing else for 24hr plus and just dyed in the shell, but last night a chick fulling hatched is the second that fulling hatched and dyed. So two hatched and dyed and another never made it out. And one fully hatched and doing great, I don't get it. There is no pattern to nail down the issue.

We got ride of one of the fulling hatched dead chicks, but it looks like the hen got ride of the other two (one hatched, and other still hatching) on her own. They were there at 9am to day and gone by 10:30.

There in the barn in a caged ben off the ground with a heat lamp just in case they need heat. The hens seem fine and healthy, and the first chick is doing great.

Why would the others dye?

Some of the hatched eggs where small as the younger hens eggs are also being hatched. Could it be the age of the Hens and the eggs are not sufficient to make chicks, i.e. the yoke is too small?

Thx for all your help.

I had very poor hatch results with my most reliable broody hen last year and I put it down to using pullets eggs. Mine pipped but failed to hatch and the only one that made it out, did so with my assistance....something I have never needed to do with a broody hen before (I broody hatched 56 live chicks last year, so I'm not a complete novice). The chick that did hatch from that batch was poor and took much longer to mature than any of my other chicks and my gut feeling is that the pullets eggs I set were just to early in their cycle to be sufficiently nutritious to support a strong chick.

Occasionally, first time broodies panic when they feel a chick wriggling around under them and peck at it, so it could also be that the broody accidentally killed some of them or, if she was brooding in a communal nest box, another hen got into the nest to lay whilst it was hatching or just afterwards and stood on it and crushed it to death. Communal nest boxes are not great for broody hens in my opinion for this reason. If the chicks were missing, rats are another possibility, although broody hens will clean up the nest by eating anything that is edible and needs removing ie broken eggs, shells and all. I've not had any of my broodies eat a chick but they are certainly capable of it and other flock members have run off with one, when I've had one die and removed it and put it down for a moment whilst I was doing something else, so could have been another hen too. Another thing that can happen is that a chick can fall out of the nest and not be able to climb back in during those first few hours and get cold and die or be taken by another hen, whilst the broody is still on the nest. This is morew likely to happen if the broody is a lower ranking bird.
So there are many possibilities as to what happened to the chicks that died/disappeared but I would go with your thoughts on the failure to hatch/thrive probably being down to you using young pullets eggs.

By the way, you absolutely do not need a heat lamp with a broody hen and there are threads every year on BYC about chicken coop/barn fires caused by them, so do yourself a favour and remove it.

Good luck with the chick that hatched. I hope it grows quicker than my chick!

Regards

Barbara

Hi,

Thx for the info.

I have converted a dog crate and rabbit cage for the two broody hens, so no other chickens can get at them. We do have cats but they have never hurt the chickens and would have a hard time getting the baby chick and even harder time with the egg out of the cage.

With the one chick doing so well, I think even though its the first time brooding the hen is good to mother them.

I think it may be some are too young to hatch a healthy chick. I'll pull the small eggs and put the larger ones down as the hens are 2 years old.

Thx for all you help.

Like Barbara said, lots of things could possibly have happened. Sitting across the internet it’s impossible to know what really did. I’ll mention a few of my observations.

You mentioned two broody hems. Some people on this forum really love having two or more broody hens hatch together and raise the chicks together. I’m not one of them. Sometimes it works out great, sometimes there are problems. I’ve had two broody hens fight over a nest and destroy half the eggs a few days before they were to hatch. I haven’t seen it myself but some people say they’ve seen a broody hen kill chicks under another broody hen when they were sharing a nest and hatching together. I don’t know how your broody hens are set up but that raises another possibility.

I regularly hatch pullet eggs. You can get really great hatches with pullet eggs, but sometimes you don’t. When a pullet first starts to lay she can have some messed up eggs. You can get thin-shelled, really hard shelled, double yolkers, no yolk eggs, and just weird eggs. That’s just the stuff you see. A lot has to be right internal to the egg as well for it to hatch as well. It’s a complicated process, to me the remarkable thing is how many get it right to start with. Normally the ones that don’t get it right to start with straighten everything out within a week or two.

When a pullet first starts to lay her eggs are normally pretty small, but they gradually get bigger as time goes by. I generally do not set eggs from a pullet that has been laying less than a month, but if she has been laying a month, I’ll stick her eggs in the incubator or under a broody.

In general I get decent hatch rates with these pullet eggs. I’ve noticed that the hatch rate is not as good as with eggs from older hens, but it’s usually not horrible. One exception to that was last year. I set six eggs from one specific pullet, I could tell by color. None of those eggs even started to develop. I think the pullet was still running from the rooster instead of squatting when he danced. That specific rooster was one of those really nice to his hens, if they ran he quit instead of chasing them down, so I blame that on the rooster. The result was no fertile eggs. I set five eggs from another pullet in that same hatch. All five of those eggs hatched. Both pullets had been laying about a month.

To put it more in perspective, if I set a dozen pullet eggs and a dozen eggs from older hens in the same hatch, I’ll probably get one more older hen egg to hatch than the pullet eggs. That’s not horrible.

When the pullet eggs hatch the chicks are not going to be as big as the chicks from older hens’ eggs. The eggs are smaller so they can’t hold enough nutrients for the chicks to grow as big. That’s a good thing because if they grew really big they would be too tight in the shell to be able to move to hatch. When I hatch a chick, I hardly ever have a chick die, whether in the incubator or under a broody hen. It’s really pretty rare. But when one dies it’s likely to be one from a pullet egg. And it’s usually going to be in the first week or two. Once they get past that, they are good to go.

I don’t know if those dead chicks had anything at all to do with them being pullet eggs or not. It’s possible. But I’m quite comfortable setting pullet eggs as long as they have been laying at least a month.

I totally agree on getting rid of that heat lamp. The broody hen does not need it and it is actually a danger. Broody hen shave ben hatching chicks without help from humans ever since there have been chickens, sometimes in pretty cold weather. They don’t need that kind of help, it can cause problems. Trust your broody hens, let them do their job.

Hi,

Thx. I don't keep the brooding hens with any other hen. Both are set up in there own cage.

Heat lamp is gone, although my understanding from research is we have domesticated chickens from India so if thats the case Humans have been helping from day one with the North American chicken. But I total agree, I want it to be as natural as posable for them.

I know that all three that dyed came from small eggs, so there from the younger hens, but they have been laying for months. Although the new brooding hen cracket open an egg and no yoke within it so I'm guessing the eggs are the issue.

There are two eggs left and if they hatch should show me if there are issues with all young hens eggs as she has one big and one small under her.

Thx for you help.