Advice please!! Poor quail hatch (10%!)

Soph_quail

Chirping
Jun 27, 2020
64
61
78
Hello I wonder if somebody can help me.
I am fairly new to hatching quail, this is only my second attempt. However both attempts have resulted in poor hatches.
the first hatch we didn’t have a secondary temperature gauge or a humidity gauge so attributed our poor hatch (only 10% success) to this lack of control.
However, since then we have invested in 4 temperature gauges and 3 humidity gauges for our second hatch.
The first hatch 5 pipped on day 16 but only 1 survived and we assumed the high humidity had caused them to grow to big and were unable to hatch properly. The autopsy seemed to show this too as the heads were in the wrong place.
however, this hatch we had 1 egg pip on day 15 from the wrong end, however 24 hours later they successfully hatched. A day later (day 17) 1 chick pipped and zipped within 30minutes. We removed both these chicks within 24hours of them hatching - being sure to check for no external pips of other eggs before doing so. However it is now day 20 and we have 18 eggs left in the incubator with 0 signs of pipping. For this hatch our incubator was set at 40.8°c but it was running cold and our temperature gauges all measured at 38°C. And our humidity was between 40-50% until day 15 and has been on 70-80% since lockdown. We have an automatic turner and on day 8 candling revealed Atleast 65% were developing normally. Any ideas on why this hatch has been so poor so far?? Advice on what to do and how to improve would be much appreciated!! Thank you!!
 
Hello I wonder if somebody can help me.
I am fairly new to hatching quail, this is only my second attempt. However both attempts have resulted in poor hatches.
the first hatch we didn’t have a secondary temperature gauge or a humidity gauge so attributed our poor hatch (only 10% success) to this lack of control.
However, since then we have invested in 4 temperature gauges and 3 humidity gauges for our second hatch.
The first hatch 5 pipped on day 16 but only 1 survived and we assumed the high humidity had caused them to grow to big and were unable to hatch properly. The autopsy seemed to show this too as the heads were in the wrong place.
however, this hatch we had 1 egg pip on day 15 from the wrong end, however 24 hours later they successfully hatched. A day later (day 17) 1 chick pipped and zipped within 30minutes. We removed both these chicks within 24hours of them hatching - being sure to check for no external pips of other eggs before doing so. However it is now day 20 and we have 18 eggs left in the incubator with 0 signs of pipping. For this hatch our incubator was set at 40.8°c but it was running cold and our temperature gauges all measured at 38°C. And our humidity was between 40-50% until day 15 and has been on 70-80% since lockdown. We have an automatic turner and on day 8 candling revealed Atleast 65% were developing normally. Any ideas on why this hatch has been so poor so far?? Advice on what to do and how to improve would be much appreciated!! Thank you!!
38*C sounds a bit high, temperature-wise. 37.5 (perhaps a smidge higher) is optimal. The survivors are hatching early, which also indicates a high temperature to me—often, the bulk of my quail hatch on day 18, albeit early in such. Are you candling the eggs to gauge air cells? Your overall humidity sounds quite high to me, but then again, I run at lower humidities than many other folks. Watching the size of the air cells is the best way to figure out what humidity you should be running at, IMO. Have you calibrated your thermometers? The fact that they agree is good, but I would still err on the side of caution and test them. Are these shipped eggs? I assume they're Coturnix (aka Japanese) quail.
 
38*C sounds a bit high, temperature-wise. 37.5 (perhaps a smidge higher) is optimal. The survivors are hatching early, which also indicates a high temperature to me—often, the bulk of my quail hatch on day 18, albeit early in such. Are you candling the eggs to gauge air cells? Your overall humidity sounds quite high to me, but then again, I run at lower humidities than many other folks. Watching the size of the air cells is the best way to figure out what humidity you should be running at, IMO. Have you calibrated your thermometers? The fact that they agree is good, but I would still err on the side of caution and test them. Are these shipped eggs? I assume they're Coturnix (aka Japanese) quail.
Hi thanks for your response! We bought some cheap thermometers off of amazon That are easy to read but we also own a calibrated thermometer and when comparing the temperatures they came out to be the same so we knew they were accurate. In my post I stated 38° as an estimate but off the top of my head I’m not entirely sure what it was. Once we added the eggs the temperature dropped to around 37° and never fully came back up again so if anything I expected a later hatch. We aimed for 45% humidity however a lot of the time it ran lower and we had a hard time keeping it consistent. overnight and sometimes in the day it would drop to 28% and we’d have to bring it up to 45% could this fluctuation cause issues? I was more concerned about the humidity getting too high so made sure it never exceeded 50% but I’m not sure if it being too low could have caused problems too. We candled them on day 7 and found obvious signs of development correlating to what should be happening at day 7 but didn’t anymore times as we didn’t want to cause too much disruption in the incubator. We also don’t have a light that is 100% suitable for quail candling so seeing anything is quite a task in itself so we opted not to. We own 6 laying quail ourselves and all the eggs were from them. We know the males are active so they should be fertile and the development we saw on day 7 indicates they were and yes they’re Coturnix. Although the temperature seemed pretty accurate to me, I may try to aim for a slightly lower temperature for my next hatch And see if that helps. however for our last hatch the incubator was set to 37.9° and it was only after the hatch failed that we used our thermometer that showed it was actually about 36°. So I’m really unsure what the problem has been for both these hatches. Thanks for your response and advice!
 
My experience with hatching coturnix quail tells me that 37.5 degrees celcius is ideal and I have had much better hatch rates at 30% humidity, raising it to around 50-60% when they pip.

Do you know if you had a lot of temperature fluctuation? That is probably more critical than humidity fluctuation.
 
My experience with hatching coturnix quail tells me that 37.5 degrees celcius is ideal and I have had much better hatch rates at 30% humidity, raising it to around 50-60% when they pip.

Do you know if you had a lot of temperature fluctuation? That is probably more critical than humidity fluctuation.
I’ll try a lower temperature/humidity next time and see if that helps! And no I don’t think so, I would check the temperature everytime I checked humidity (so every few hours or so) and it would read the same. l have since read a review of my incubator that said the rollers are too forceful for quail eggs so I’m wondering whether improper turning could have caused this? I may try manual turning for my next hatch and see if there’s a difference as I don’t know what else Could be wrong.
 
Hi thanks for your response! We bought some cheap thermometers off of amazon That are easy to read but we also own a calibrated thermometer and when comparing the temperatures they came out to be the same so we knew they were accurate. In my post I stated 38° as an estimate but off the top of my head I’m not entirely sure what it was. Once we added the eggs the temperature dropped to around 37° and never fully came back up again so if anything I expected a later hatch. We aimed for 45% humidity however a lot of the time it ran lower and we had a hard time keeping it consistent. overnight and sometimes in the day it would drop to 28% and we’d have to bring it up to 45% could this fluctuation cause issues? I was more concerned about the humidity getting too high so made sure it never exceeded 50% but I’m not sure if it being too low could have caused problems too. We candled them on day 7 and found obvious signs of development correlating to what should be happening at day 7 but didn’t anymore times as we didn’t want to cause too much disruption in the incubator. We also don’t have a light that is 100% suitable for quail candling so seeing anything is quite a task in itself so we opted not to. We own 6 laying quail ourselves and all the eggs were from them. We know the males are active so they should be fertile and the development we saw on day 7 indicates they were and yes they’re Coturnix. Although the temperature seemed pretty accurate to me, I may try to aim for a slightly lower temperature for my next hatch And see if that helps. however for our last hatch the incubator was set to 37.9° and it was only after the hatch failed that we used our thermometer that showed it was actually about 36°. So I’m really unsure what the problem has been for both these hatches. Thanks for your response and advice!
How come the humidity kept swinging so much? Are your water pans quite shallow?
I would try and get a better candler so you can keep a closer eye on the air cells. I don't have any advice more specific than that, apologies. Like Nabiki said, if you manage to get a stable, verified 37.5*C and decently stable humidity with appropriately sized air cells, then I would look into breeder nutrition/genetics, perhaps experimenting with eggs from different sources to rule out a genetic or nutritional cause for the late quitters.

Malpositioning can indeed be caused by improper turning or turning that continues too late into the incubation window, especially since you were having early hatches and presumably didn't lock down proportionally.
 
Hello I wonder if somebody can help me.
I am fairly new to hatching quail, this is only my second attempt. However both attempts have resulted in poor hatches.
the first hatch we didn’t have a secondary temperature gauge or a humidity gauge so attributed our poor hatch (only 10% success) to this lack of control.
However, since then we have invested in 4 temperature gauges and 3 humidity gauges for our second hatch.
The first hatch 5 pipped on day 16 but only 1 survived and we assumed the high humidity had caused them to grow to big and were unable to hatch properly. The autopsy seemed to show this too as the heads were in the wrong place.
however, this hatch we had 1 egg pip on day 15 from the wrong end, however 24 hours later they successfully hatched. A day later (day 17) 1 chick pipped and zipped within 30minutes. We removed both these chicks within 24hours of them hatching - being sure to check for no external pips of other eggs before doing so. However it is now day 20 and we have 18 eggs left in the incubator with 0 signs of pipping. For this hatch our incubator was set at 40.8°c but it was running cold and our temperature gauges all measured at 38°C. And our humidity was between 40-50% until day 15 and has been on 70-80% since lockdown. We have an automatic turner and on day 8 candling revealed Atleast 65% were developing normally. Any ideas on why this hatch has been so poor so far?? Advice on what to do and how to improve would be much appreciated!! Thank you!!
UPDATE - not sure if anybody will actually care but I thought I should provide an update! We took everybodies advice and decided to not add any water at all during incubation and spent multiple days prior to incubation calibrating our temperature and we finally had our first successful hatch! Started with 21 eggs but candling revealed 2 were duds. So in the end out of 19 16 successfully Hatched! We sadly had 2 die after popping and one that never made it that far. But the rest are happy and healthy!
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