I am not sure I understand what you did with the eggs, did you float test and follow the steps in that article? Pictures can really help others in helping you out too. Sorry your having such issues, calibrating and having good hygros and thermos are key to hatching along with understanding humidity is NOT a set number, humidity is a tool and it should be used and ADJUSTED to achieve the correct weight loss/air cell growth in the egg either tracking by weighing or marking air cells and making adjustments as needed. So many people come for help with either stuck chicks or wet chicks, Dry incubation does not imply no water either, use it as a tool only. I hope you have a better hatch next time around with a good hygro and some more reading, so sorry this is so stressful for you too. Again all the information I can give you I put into some articles to help others understand all that I have learned along the way.
Hi Sally,
Thank you very much for all your advise throughout the thread and sorry, I did not answer your question. I had a really busy week and although I wanted answers to all of my questions I was usually in a rush when reading through this.
I just candled the eggs, I didn't feel floating the eggs was that good an idea. I don't like exposing eggs to water in general. I was going to do it before throwing the eggs perhaps, but in the meantime I decided on candling and marking them.
The chick I originally posted about, came out alright and I think it would have done ok without any help at all (I actually hardly helped it anyway). The second chick was malpositioned and picked below the air chamber, so not so sure about him/her. I helped it along quite a big, but it came out with a lot of stuff still attached, so perhaps it would have just needed more time, too, but we will never know.
Altogether the hatch was not bad. I had 12 eggs (3 of our own, 3 from somebody else and another 6 from another friend). Our own 3 were infertile, so that means the rooster is looking for a new home!!! The other lot of 3, was one infertile and 2 yellow chicks (these are the ones I helped). The lot of 6 had 1 infertile, 1 with detached airsack and no development and 1 dead fully developed chick. This chick had no internal pip and I had never seen it move, but It seemed perfectly fine and yolk sack was still attached and chick folded. I might try and post a picture of this to see what other think, but it might just be one of those things. Anyway, 3 live chicks out of that lot. This means that despite me stressing there was actually only 1 chick that had died in the egg.
5 are running around chirping, so we will see how they will do. I hope they all will live, but then nature can be cruel.
Thanks to everybody that has helped me on this thread. It was very much appreciated.
