No Video Of Hen Turning Eggs Anywhere!

RAnst4038 said:

Why can't I find a video of a hen turning eggs on YouTube or Here? Are there any?
How can I build the perfect incubator & egg turner if I can't see how a hen does it?
#1 Eggs spend most of there time in the dark.
#2 They don't poop on them to increase humidity.
#3 I think a hen turning them is a little more rougher & random than wobbling them back & forth to a perfect 30*.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean by the numbered list, whether they're questions or statements or whatever. I am guessing you're comparing incubation methods, natural vs artificial? I have no idea what the pooping on eggs to increase humidity thing is about. I will try to offer some sort of response though it's hard to know what you're after due to the structure of that post.

Hens naturally nest in the soil. We prefer them to lay in straw but that's not natural for them, at least not elevated nests of straw or similar which are drier than those on the ground. Chickens are jungle birds by design and jungle soil is never dessicated. Jungles themselves tend to be humid. A chicken's body is not naturally dessicated either, it has its own mild humidity or moisture loss as do eggs as they develop. Old school farmers used to know hens were better nesting in the soil rather than on elevated platforms.

As for hens turning eggs, when it comes to frequency, it varies widely between hens. Most are very gentle and slow with them, in fact I've never seen a hen move eggs very quickly when settling onto them or rolling them under her, which is amazing considering the extremes of deficits of maternal instinct and experience and skill I've seen some hens exhibit.

As for the natural angle, you'd need to measure a wild bred junglefowl hen's breast for that, probably, because domestic hens have such a variety of breast widths and depths and that alters everything... Not to mention the nesting habits vary widely, some hens basically don't make nests so eggs lay flat and others make deep bowls of nests so the eggs sit on end. As the hen loses breast muscle through heating/brooding metabolism, I expect the angle of the eggs would increase, but since some hens brood flat and others angled, I still don't think it matters all that much.

Hens naturally leave the nest at least once a day on average but again this varies widely, some won't budge for a day, some move multiple times a day, and every time a hen leaves a nest they roll, as well as every time she moves back onto it, and every time she performs that shuffling behavior to settle them differently... Without a CCTV in the coop, who knows how many times a day they do that? Eggs can cope with a lot of sitting still as well as a lot of rolling but extremes of either kill them.

In short, eggs are able to cope with a very wide variety of maternal habits, skillsets, instinct levels etc, and they are far more resilient than is commonly believed.

The perfect incubator and egg turner is a good mother hen. Natural incubation has benefits science has yet to explain.

Best wishes.