Chicks turning eggs over.

Rhaymes

Hatching
5 Years
Aug 5, 2014
5
0
7
We just tried our first attempt of hatching eggs in our incubator. We have a still air incubator and I think some of our initial problems were temperature. We relied on the thermometer that came with the incubator, and I believe it was 3-4° F low. We have bought three other thermometers for the next try, one with a humidity reading. we had 22 eggs, and 5 hatched, and on day 22 at that, which could be attributed to the low temperature. I believe that a main problem was that when the first two or three hatched that ran crazy throughout the incubator, there where at least another 8 or 9 eggs pipped at that time, but the first ones kept running into the the other eggs and rolling them all over the place. So my questions are, how do you keep the first ones that hatched from disturbing the other eggs? Everything I have read says not to open the incubator at all during this time, and to leave the chicks in until they are fluffed, so there was nothing I could do because they took 12 hours to fluff. Also, what should the humidity be before the lock down period? Thank you
 
No don't stop that! That's a good thing. It's way to warm in there for chicks to not feel sleepy so the chicks run into them waking them/ jostling them to get them to keep trying to hatch. Hens do this by talking to them in the eggs to keep them active. But since there are no hens in an incubator the chicks take this role. Yes I've also noticed that fluff can take time to dry sometimes especially if we removed them too early (there's not too much harm except they get colder) ours took two days to fully get it's down.
 
So, when they turn eggs completely over that have already piped, and then they drown? We had 7 or 8 that had piped and were fully developed but didn't hatch because they got turned over.
 
Not normally if you feel like they will you can probably turn them right-side up. Normally by this time it's pretty dry in there because the chicks developed enough to soak up all the liquid. Go ahead and take them out if they're dry because then they need to get out anyways.
 
OK, IDK, it just seemed that all of the ones that got knocked over, upside down are the ones that did not hatch. We couldn't
take the others out, because at 12-14 hours they were still not dry but we took them out anyway to try and salvage the other egg.
 

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