Missed the Easter hatchalong, anyone else setting 4/10?

Alaskan said:

Well, I hope everyone else did well.....

Me, I am at

and

the last dominique egg hatched, the slow iffy one.... And it is missing one eye and has a very slightly (good chance of being perfect) navel.

After goggling the missing eye..... It came back with "high temps or improper handling of eggs ie. turning rotating" So, my fault, not the breeders.

I am not sure how that happened... I thought that the eggs were being turned well.... I dunno for sure though. There were a couple of times when I added new eggs (staggered hatch) that I turned off the auto-turner and gentle turned by hand only a few times that day.....

I wish one of the possible causes had been infection.... Since the Dominique eggs were the ones that had some crushed eggs, and so I had to very gently rinse off a few eggs, and .i know that is a giant no no. But, that was not on the list.

Anyway, so now I am super worried about all of the rest of the eggs.

About half of the leghorns have hatched... But there are several more pips ... And they were due just yesterday, so that aren't that kate yet.... Also, so far all of them have been healthy.

I dunno... Just very sad, and VERY disappointed with myself.

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AinaWGSD said:

And our final chick count is....20.  We had one more hatch yesterday morning (with assistance).  Last night we checked the remaining eggs (I think there were 8) and all of those chicks were dead.  From the looks of it, about half of them had intestines on the outside of the body wall, so they wouldn't have made it even if they had hatched.

Oh, and we have a broody hen now!  So I've ordered some cuckoo marans eggs to toss under her.  Now it's my turn to sweat it out with shipped eggs.  At least I know that the hen will be more reliable than the incubator!  So it's mostly a question of how rough the post office will be with them.

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