Automatic turner was off!

[Celebrity Chickens]

Hi, I have a batch of 3 dozen quail eggs in an incubator with an automatic turner. When I set it up, I forgot to turn on the automatic turner. And just realized that yesterday. They were in there from Friday night to Monday night without turning at all. When I candle, I can see embryos, but when I turn the egg, the embryos stay in one place rather than floating around the egg. Have I ruined my whole hatch by sticking the babies to the side wall of the egg? Should I just try to start fresh or keep going with this batch?
Thanks so much in advance for the replies!

 

[SteveUK]

Hi, sorry for late reply. I've just seen your post. I hope you kept going with them. I've read the opinion that it's not necessary to turn quail eggs for the first 3 days and after that they only need a little wiggle a couple of times a day. Personally I do turn my quail eggs, but it does suggest to me that they will be fine.
Let us know how you get on.

 

[Celebrity Chickens]

Thank you for the encouragement! I ended up having a semi successful hatch - 15/18 of the Jumbo Falb Fee which was great, but only 4/18 of my celadon blues. :/ Glad I kept going though to get that 50%!

 

[aBirdNerd]

Aww, they are so cute!

 

[SteveUK]

That's good news. Happy for you. Were you able to see that the Celadon were fertile when you candled them? If you haven't already I'd open those up to see what went on. I'm not sure where the eggs came from, but I can't see that not turning them early on had such a different effect on the two hatches. . More likely (in my head anyway) that they were less fertile/were older when they were set/had more of a bashing in the mail. Just my thoughts. So I wouldn't beat yourself up and I hope you get lucky with the genes of the 4 you have.

 

[Celebrity Chickens]

I spoke too soon - some of my blues were just a little late to hatch! Yay! I had 2 more Falb Fee and 7 more blues hatch. So I ended up getting 11 of the celadons which I'm happy with for starting my line .

I got them from a local breeder 30 mins away and hand carried the eggs. She ships her eggs most days but sells her mid-week eggs locally and had gathered mine the night before so I know they were fresh!

All the blues were fertile but 1 which I tossed when candling. But most embryos were very stuck to the shell so i was concerned they wouldn't be able to properly position for hatching even though they were developing well. And I think that did affect my blues as I have never had such a poor hatch rate with these incubators.
I ended up with about a 50% hatch rate for blues - but 90% for FF! 1 more of each pipped but died in the egg.

I may still open my last eggs to see if they were quitters or just unable to hatch - especially if they are still alive and I may be able to assist them out? But thought I would give them another day in the incubator just in case.

Overall the jumbos seemed much more robust than the celadons. Moral of the story seems to be - yes they can still hatch in general, but take extra care with coddling the blues! All that inbreeding to get blue eggs must weaken their vigor.
Now i just need to figure out the identity of a few chicks that have me confused. My numbers aren't adding up for how many blues actually hatched vs how many chicks appear to have a different phenotype from FF! (I have two or three like this white stripes one that are baffling me as to where they came from - recessive FF genes? Accidentally got some assorted eggs? Miscounted my blues?)