McGill love it poopalots
Umama..
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..perfect hatch....and 3 shipped too! Wow..What was your humidity?Tell me your secret!
Roxanne,
I think the secret is having an accurate thermometer and hygrometer. I got mine at incubator warehouse.com. I used a
Brinsea octagon 20, and it is supposed to hold the temperature within .5 degree of the calibrated temparature, but I found that it can vary more than one degree depending in the room temperature. Anyways, I adjusted the temperature daily -sometimes twice a day- to keep it between 99.3 and 99.7 degrees. There were a couple of times the temperature dipped to 98.5 after I candled the eggs, and stayed at this temperature overnight (because I didn't know the bator couldn't get back to the target temp on it's own,) but that didn't seem to hurt the eggs. By the way,
Brinsea is now putting cooling cycles in their bators now as that is believed to help the embryos develop, mimicking nature. I guess I had a couple cooling cycles on accident.
On the humidity, I started out dry incubating - room humidity was 50% but the bator's was running around 30%. After four days, I weighed several eggs, and checked the average weight loss. They were losing weight too fast - I was targeting 13% loss overall - so I added water and raised the humidity to be around 45%. I kept the humidity between 40-50% between day 4 and day 18.
On lock down, I put the eggs in lock down at day 18.5. Counting the day I set the eggs as day 0. The humidity was raised to 65%. The first chick hatched 30 hours after lock down. As the chicks hatch, the humidity naturally increased to 75%, and at 78% at the peak. After the first 8 chicks hatch, they were crowding the bator so I took them out. I added hot water after I open the bator to compensate for the drop in humidity when I open it. This temporarily raised the temp to 100% and humidity is quickly raised back up to the 70's before settling around 65% again. Although one egg took 30 hrs from pip to hatch, of those that hatched, they hatched within 20 hrs of the first hatch. I had eggs that varied in size, small to jumbo.
I thought mine hatched a day early, but I watched some videos of hatchery hatching process, and my timeline happened to match their timelines almost exactly. I started to give them food and water about 12 hours after I put them in the brooder. I dipped their beaks in the water to show them where water was, and within a few hours, all were eating and drinking. I waited 12 hours to give them food and water because they all were just sleeping, and were still unsteady on their feet in the first 12 hours. Now, nearly three days later, some are already trying to fly.
My daughter watched some videos on how to sex chicks, and she sexed them using the wing feather method. She thinks we have 8 girls and 9 boys.
This was a summer science project with my girls. We will be giving all the chicks away today to our friends. My daughters have been holding the chicks to socialize them. It's quite amazing to see the different reactions between chicks that had been held a lot to those that haven't been. Yes, my daughters have their favorites. The ones that had been held a lot do not run away when we put our hands in the brooder. They may even come toward our hands. Those that haven't been held much would scatter away.
And we got 4 out of the 7 shipped eggs to hatch. They were sent via UPS so it took four days to get to us. They were laid on Monday morning, shipped the same day, and were set on Friday evening, six hours after they were delivered. I only let them rest on the counter for a few hours instead of a full 24 hours like some threads had suggested. I figured it was better to set them as soon as possible since it took extra long for them to get to california from massachusetts. The weather was hot across the country, and I was worried that they would be damaged. When I got them, they smelled musty and some were slightly damp.
