How do you position your eggs during lock down?

[Bryan Moore]

I have hatched 2 times and both times I have laid on their sides. Good success so far

 

[yinepu]

this is one of the most realistic statements

I have decided, in my humble opinion, bad hatch rates come from 2 things. less than ideal eggs or less than ideal understanding of the process.

Doing a meta-analysis of hundreds of people on this site's hatches - including my own - I have made the following observations:

Get good eggs. Practice hatching on eggs from your hens or someone nearby. Know that they are fresh, unshaken and from robust chickens you have seen with your own eyes.

Make a plan and stick to it. If you are going dry incubation then do it. If you are following the instructions of the incubator, do it. Make notes. Learn about your eggs development. I numbered all my first eggs and weighed them on day 0, 7, 1i0 and 18. I knew those eggs when they hatched. 18 went into lock down, 17 came out alive.

Get a strong LED flashlight - forget the incandescent plug in candler you bought from amazon. Look at them on day 7-10, 14 and 18. Learn what they should look like.

Unless you absolutely positively cannot live a day longer without a breed of chicken that is not available locally - dont buy shipped eggs, If you do, dont get all analytic about what you did right or wrong by hatching them without a baseline. Instead, hatch some control group eggs. Once you have established a good hatch rate with a local source, hatch the local eggs along side those precious ones. If you get a good hatch from the control group and a poor one from the ebay eggs then guess what? Its the eggs. Now if both batches are poor, its your technique.ou handle

Wash your dirty little hands with soap an water for 2 minutes before you handle an egg. We set incubators at 99.5F - the same temp hospital labs use to see if you have bacteria in your wound blood or pee. They leave the specimen in for 3 days to see if it grows bugs. Our poor eggs are in 21 days - enough to create a biological weapon.

I also believe the term lockdown is like old days when the husband was in the way during birthing and told to go boil lots of water. Its invented to stop interfering - including the rolling of eggs. If you need to get a chick out of the bator to intervene or its been a staggered hatch, then get it out. There is not a magical force that suddenly shrink wraps an egg. We are making chickens - not soufles. Shrink wrapping is something that happens over time with low humidity in a pipped egg.

Finally, get advice from people with more than opinions. Use the resources on this site that are brilliant. Sally Sunshine and Sumi on https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/704328/diary-notes-air-cell-detatched-shipped-eggs are amazing. Sally has stayed up all night helping people assist their one surviving chick out of the egg. On that thread and many others, there are heroes of BYC. Get to know them. Get to know who you can ask for advice, get to know your incubator, get to know your eggs and finally get to know when to mess with them and when to leave them alone.

Good luck

Lol.. i have had members from here calling me at 2 am wanting to know what to do.. have also gotten PM's from people I had no clue were on here. i used to hang out in the hatching forum.. but it got to be too frustrating to have people beg for help.. and as soon as I would give advice the same old people would come out of the woodwork contradicting what i was telling people. My husband would go through their old posts and find that they were not getting 100% hatch rates consistently.. but it seemed no one would listen to what I had to say even though i had the experience and hatch rates to back it up... later on those same people would parrot every bit of advice I had given as if it were thiers... so I got frustrated and gave up.. yet the 2 AM phone calls would continue (I would still love to find out which of my "friends" gave out my number) and I STILL get the private messages to this day.
I don't mean to sound as if I am complaining. But I just get so tired of the same old bad advice being given out and repeated like it's the bible of chick hatching.

 

[dretd]

.. Plus I have been hatching them out for over 50 years now.

opening the bator during "lockdown" will NOT cause shrinkwrapping... what normally causes it is the location of the fan in relation to the hatching eggs.
If the humidity has been correct throughout incubation and there is no direct fan blowing across those eggs they will not dry out and shrinkwrap. Just look at a broody hen.. the humidity under her does not suddenly rise three magical days before hatch.. it stays the same until the first chick is out of the egg.. even then I have seen hens leave their nests with pipped and zipping chicks and come back later on and hatch them out perfectly. The major difference between her and an incubator is that she does not have a fan under her behind blowing right on those eggs.

I have been wondering a lot about that fan. Could someone with more years of chicken-rearing than I have been alive give me a few more pearls?

I have working out of a borrowed styro Hovabator with fan retofit. I made my own incubator awhile back and really thought that the fan dired out the one chick that hatched (yep--did everything wrong, Noob with home made incubator and shipped eggs--the Bermuda Triangle for chicks

)

I have learned from my past errors and have a broken-in borrowed incubator with auto-turner with helpful notes from the user, more hatches under my belt and I hand carried the eggs on the plane avoiding the TSA xrays.

The one thing that has me wondering is what to do with the fan at lockdown. Leave it on and risk a wind-tunnel for the little pipping chicks or turn it off and have decreased air exchange and more temp variability. Is there a way to diffuse the airflow with baffles--Its not my incubator so I can't mess with the fan directly?

I hope y'all don't mind me rejuvenating an older thread but I figured its only 3 months dead so it doesn't qualify as a zombie...yet. and there are a few very amazing founts of wisdom that had posted here so its really worth a read!

 

[yinepu]

Quote:
at hatch if you are worried about the fan blowing directly onto the hatching eggs.. just lay a wet paper towel or light weight wet section of cloth (if laundered make sure there is no fabric softener in the cloth) over them.. it will raise humidity plus block the direct air flow.. and it's light enough that it won't hinder the hatching chicks.. it WILL keep you from viewing what's going on.. so you will have to weigh the options and see which is more important to you. When I had the Brinseas (now at the local landfill..) I used wet paper towels over the eggs at hatch and it did help correct the fan issue..

another option is to add a dimmer switch to the fan.. my husband just made me a coolerbator for the excess of eggs we have right now (last count was just over 260 being hand turned) and we will be adding a dimmer switch to the fan before the next incubation (I am using one of my Reptipros as a hatcher)

with a dimmer switch you will still need to play with temps. but I would use it to dial the fan down a bit and stabilize temps before ever adding the eggs.. that would help avoid temp swings at hatch when you would normally turn down the fan