Dry(er) Lockdown?

[Tuhmu]

So I'm getting a couple shipped eggs Friday and I just wanted to see what peoples opinions are on this.

Usually I religiously watched the humidity and kept it around 40-45 with poor results, then I went down to 30-35 and started to get slightly better results with 60-70 humidity. But still the same, fully formed chicks that just didn't pip.

Well on my last hatch, last year; I didn't hold much stock in the eggs. They were from an abandoned turkey nest, I didn't know how long they were sitting out in the elements nor what stage they were in (though I was guessing around 2 weeks after candeling); they were left out on my deck. So I just kind of put them in the brinsea, set it to 30-35 and left them. After a couple weeks I woke up to a bunch of little babies, all but two of the 10 had hatched. All without bumping the humidity.

I guess I'm just curious what peoples opinions are. Was this just a coincidence? Maybe they started hatching all about the same time and built up enough of their own humidity?

I'm wondering if maybe trying a drier lockdown would be more beneficial? Or if it was just not messing around with the humidity and using the dry incubation method that led to better results?

Just looking for opinions, I really want to get the best results with this batch of eggs and haven't really hatched much for a few years other than those turkeys. Not sure if there's been any new developments are theories being thrown around.

My hens are currently freeloaders and I haven't had an egg since last year, so I can't do a practice run.

 

[jay873]

In my experiences Humidity doesn’t even matter that much I’ve had incubation where humidity was 60+ all throughout the process and got amazing results and I’ve had incubation where I put the wrong date in my calendar and humidity never got up above 50 even during the hatching phase the eggs were still in the turner cause I put an extra week. Some people will swear humidity is the key and lower is better but. I personally think it’s about the quality of the eggs and the quality of the incubator. Rather than humidty. But I would say around 50-60

 

[Alaskan]

I prefer humidity around 35 during incubation and 60 ish at hatch.

But the problem with incubating is that there are MANY factors. Age of eggs, quality of eggs, nutrition of parents, etc.

 

[aart]

I prefer humidity around 35 during incubation and 60 ish at hatch.

But the problem with incubating is that there are MANY factors. Age of eggs, quality of eggs, nutrition of parents, etc.

Ditto Dat^^^

 

[Tuhmu]

So just to give an update. We had 3 out of 9 shipped eggs and 1 egg from home make it to lockdown. Just two of the shipped eggs hatched. I had humidity set at 55% for lockdown and the two that hatched seemed to have done it with ease.

The other were fully developed but didn't pip internally.

Any thoughts?

I have 4 shipped eggs that go into lockdown today now too.

 

[Tuhmu]

A couple other details are that the incubator is a brinsea advanced and I candled on day 7,14, 18.

Mostly kind of worried why our farm egg didn't hatch ( i know its just the one but still, kind of assumed that one would have had the best chance ) and failed to internally pip. The hens are on a layer ration and are free ranged in the evenings, the egg was maybe 6 hours old. It was developing beautifully, nice big blood veins throughout the process.

 

[Alaskan]

Here are 2 good pages to help you troubleshoot.

This one is nice since it is in chart form, however, it doesn't go over the problem you asked about (chick fully formed but not internally pipping)
http://extension.msstate.edu/content/trouble-shooting-failures-egg-incubation

This page isn't in a chart format, but DOES go over the issue you asked about:

http://extension.illinois.edu/eggs/res24-00.html

I hope those help.

Personally I have found that increasing the nutrition of the parents makes a HUGE difference. So nutritional yeast, salmon, carrot peelings, etc..