Collecting eggs for incubation

[ValleyGamebirds]

Hello everyone, I'm new to the forums.
I had a question on incubation. I had purchased four ringneck pheasants, one rooster and three hens. When I started collecting eggs for incubation, I would pick them up the day they were laid, label the date on them, and put them in the incubator. During the laying season I got about 25-30 eggs, I hand turned them, kept a steady 99.5 temperature and always kept water in the tray. But I earned a terrible, terrible hatch rate of 5 birds. I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong? I received 24 quail eggs three weeks ago and six have already hatched this morning, and the way I incubate them is the exact same as the ringneck eggs. I'm using a little giant unit. I would like to purchase more ringneck eggs, because of my terrible hatch rate. But I'm more interested in what I am doing wrong. Should I leave the eggs in the pen and gather them all the same day? This was my first time incubating eggs, and I'm just looking for more info. Thank you in advance.

 

[thehackleguy]

You can pick them up and store them pointed end down in a cool place for up to 2 weeks (or longer) and set them all at once. The hatch rate could be a number of things from your breeders to contaminates in your area, it is hard to tell. Give them a good quality breeder pellet and vitamin mix in the water once a week and you should see better results. Were the other eggs fertile and just not hatch or were they not fertile at all as far as you could tell?

 

[donrae]

I'm not familiar with pheasants, but chicken eggs do much, much better if you collect the eggs and start incubating them all at once. Adding them to the incubator as you describe leads to a staggered hatch, where you have a few chicks hatching each day over a long period of time. I'm guessing pheasants need increased humidity at the end of incubation like a chicken does, and doing a staggered hatch messes this up. If you haven't, read the stickies at the top of this forum, and research the lockdown concept and increasing humidity. I think that's the difference, your shipped eggs were all set at once and your collected eggs weren't.

I'd collect eggs from the nests each day and store them as described above. When you have the desired number of eggs, or at less than 2 weeks time for the oldest eggs, set them all in your incubator and see how that does.

 

[ValleyGamebirds]

Thank you for the replies and the info. I didn't know that you could gather them without incubating. This was my birds first breeding season, so would that make it more likely that the eggs weren't fertile? After the average hatch time passed by a couple of days, I cracked a couple of eggs open with no embryos. Those eggs were from the first week of laying. I cracked two more open from the 3rd week of laying. One had an embryo and one did not. I will be sure to read the stickies. Thank you both again!