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

[Nabiki]

If all of your conditions are good, I would find a different source for your eggs.

 

[BantyChooks]

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.