DIary of a novice, shipped egg, broody hatch

[cwrite]

That sounds like a great setup & she's such a pretty hen. Beautiful colouring!

 

[appps]

DAY 4 - Was relieved to hear that penny came out to eat this morning when my son let all the chooks out. I've not noticed any food missing or seen her out so I was starting to wonder if I should be taking her off the nest to eat as I've seen some others on here do. Seems she knows what she is doing after all so I will stop worrying.

Mind you I was taking her off when I'd open up while I was waiting for my eggs to arrive because the wait added another week to how long she we will be broody but all she would do is eat at best a mouthful of food then head straight back in so it didn't really achieve anything anyway. So will just let her be and assume nature knows best. If a bear can not eat for months I suppose a chicken's metabolism knows enough to slow down while brooding too.

On the incubator front was woken by an alarm going off at 4am as my humidity hit 42%. I'm still undecided what to do about the humidity as I see people also doing something called dry incubating and they seem to use a humidity till lockdown closer to 30 rather than the 50 recommended. I'm thinking maybe I split the difference and keep it round 40.

I am going to have to work out how to better add water. The channels I'm supposed to fill are below the egg turning tray and the plastic grate below that so the first time I filled them I had to lift everything out to do it. I did see the suggestion of using a chicken baster to squeeze water in without moving everything so might see if I can pick one up at the discount store today.

 

[appps]

That sounds like a great setup & she's such a pretty hen.  Beautiful colouring! 

Thanks . The colouring is referred to as partridge. It's a nice colour also because you can sex the chickens from it as they start getting older as the boys get an orange red on their chests and saddle feathers. Handy with something like a silkie that you normally need to crow to tell what it is.

 

[appps]

DAY 4.5 - Well on a positive Penny came out to eat by herself for the second morning running so obviously she knows not to totally starve herself which is good!

On a not so positive I couldn't wait any longer and candled the three incubator eggs last night and wasn't real excited by what I found.

Egg no.1 has a hairline crack in it down near the pointy end. Obviously it suffered more in transit than I first thought. Hopefully more of the eggs under Penny don't have the same problem. Other than that I couldn't see anything, but my eyesight is not that great these days ( don't get me started on the hidden cost of staring at iPhone screens)

Oh and btw the eggs got dirty when I put them under Penny originally before I took them back out because they werent fitting. Ive tried carefully scratching off but its stuck like glue.


Egg no2 has what looks like a blood ring forming near the yolk. Which would mean it was alive but has died. I didn't take it out yet, will let it develop further in case it's just my novice eyes misleading me but Im not optimistic

Egg no3 I couldn't see anything at first but then one of the kids spotted another red ring starting.

I also ran into problems with the incubator yesterday. As the humidity started to go down to the lower 45-50% range where I want it the temperature according to the second calibrated thermometer I have in it started to go up. Yet the incubator still thought it was sitting happily on 37.5C. It reached as high as 38.2C (100.76F) on my second thermometer. I ended up having to tell the incubator I wanted to hatch at 37C to get it correct at 37.5C on my second one.

The second thermometer (actually it's a hygrometer) also tells me it's humidity reading is off (higher) by about 8% as well but I've no idea which is correct, it or the incubator. I'm leaning towards trusting my second hygrometer though.

 

[cwrite]

I can't give you any advice since I have no experience with incubators, but I found this progression of egg development in candling pics & it looks like a blood ring is normal in the early days. Hopefully they were just slow starters!
https://www.backyardchickens.com/a/candling-pics-progression-through-incubation-of-chicken-eggs

 

[appps]

I can't give you any advice since I have no experience with incubators, but I found this progression of egg development in candling pics & it looks like a blood ring is normal in the early days.  Hopefully they were just slow starters!
https://www.backyardchickens.com/a/candling-pics-progression-through-incubation-of-chicken-eggs

That's a great link! The ones I looked at made it sound like a ring meant infection had got in. They are seeing that at 52hrs and we would be 24 hrs later but then my eggs could be a day behind as they spent time not fitting under the hen before I put them in the incubator.

Thank goodness I didn't throw them out, I'll give them a bit longer to see what develops.

 

[CB and CG]

Hi appps, just saw your thread so I thought I would post here to subscribe and keep up to date with your hatch.

 

[appps]

Hi appps, just saw your thread so I thought I would post here to subscribe and keep up to date with your hatch.

Helloo . Hopefully this journey will end up with some babies as nice as yours!

 

[appps]

5 1/2 days - Well its not good news on the egg front Im afraid. Part of me wanted to know and candle and part of me though ignorance might be a better way to go. Finally I decided that it might be good news so Id look and put myself out of my misery.

The cracked egg looked exactly the same so I am guessing it just got too scrambled in transit to develop.

Egg no.2 which had the most obvious ring in it last time now looks like this

Not much doubt we have a failed one with a blood ring Im afraid.

Egg No.3 doesnt look any worse than it did last time so havent given up on it. In fact if anything its possibly less ring looking and it hasnt gotten any redder where the one above has a definate red colour to the whole egg now.
Bit hard to see in the photo but it just had a sort of redder patch in one area on the left hand side.

I tried tweaking a bit in photoshop but its still not very clear in the photo


Im going to wait till Sunday which will be day 8? (they went under her Friday night) to candle the ones under Penny and these again. Have to admit the what day am I on thing is confusing me LOL Ive not thrown anything yet but I will throw the cracked one and the red ring one then unless anything changes in the meantime.

 

[maddogdodge]

I hope you don't end up with too many losses!!
I've learnt quite a bit from this thread already, thanks for doing this diary thing

I understand not everyone can do this but I think the first time i'll give hatching a go, i'll use some of my own eggs from my hens + roo.. I'm not brave enough to buy eggs on the first time, cause I might make mistakes.