Egg Fertilization ?

[ChickenJohn1]

How do you tell if an egg is fertilized? I was trying to incubate some eggs I "assumed" were fertile as a young rooster was seeming to have covered my trusty Easter Egger hen, albeit very briefly. At the time I thought "gee is that all the longer it takes". I have been incubating eggs for 18 days when I looked at the excellent pictures of candled eggs in this site and realized I had nothing.

So is the answer, if you think a hen has been fertilized do you just start incubating and check by candling? If so how long, 2 to 3 days? Secondarily, how intense is the act of fertilizing a hen?

 

[Ridgerunner]

The only real way we have to tell if an egg is fertile is to either incubate it or look for the bull’s eye. This thread explains about the bull’s eye and has photos to help. You have to crack the egg to check for the bull’s eye so obviously you can’t hatch that specific egg, but if most of the eggs you check have the bull’s eye, most of the ones you don’t crack should have it too.

Fertile Egg Photos
https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=16008&p=6

Just because an incubated egg does not develop doesn’t mean it was not fertile to start with. Something may have killed the embryo, maybe it was too hot or too cold, stored too long, something like that. Health and nutrition of the parent flock can play a part too.

How well you can see inside an egg when you candle depends a lot on the color of the egg. Blue, green, or dark brown eggs can be really hard to see inside. How good your light is and how dark the room is makes a difference too.

I usually wait seven days to candle mine. I can normally see some veining by then, but some of my green eggs are impossible to see inside. I don’t toss the ones I think are not developing at 7 days. I’ve been known to make mistakes, though with practice those are getting pretty rare now.

A normal mating goes like this:

The rooster dances. He drops a wing and sort of circles her. This tells her he is interested.

The hen squats. This gets her body on the ground so the rooster’s weight passes through her entire body, not just her legs.

The rooster hops on and grabs the back of her head. This head grab helps him keep his balance and helps get him get lined up right so he can hit the target, but it also tells the hen to raise her tail up out of his way.

He touches hos vent to hers. Some roosters are a bit slow, but often it’s over so fast you may not see it.

He hops off. She stands up, fluffs her feathers, and shakes. This fluffy shake gets the sperm in the right part of her body to fertilize eggs.

There can be a lot of variations of this, many with the hen running away and the rooster chasing her. As long as she squats to spread his weight out, it works.

 

[ChickenJohn1]

Thanks, on both counts. I didn't know it was possible to look at an egg to see if it was fertile.

The rooster(s) that I thought may be fertilizing Dorthy seemed to be more the sexual assault category than tid bitting, dancing, etc. She was definitely not squatting in invitation.

Two of our original Easter Eggers would usually squat and spread their wings a bit for me to pick them up. I always thought that was a sign of deference to me as the "master"

. Unfortunately they also liked to fly over the fence to eat under the bird feeder and became fox forage.

 

[ChickenJohn1]

Also, I read that the girls are looking for predominant combs and wattles as signs of a good looking guy. I have an Ameraucana rooster with my Jersey Giant hens. The girls have good looking straight combs and nice wattles, while the rooster has a pea comb and no wattles. Will they naturally reject his advances or am I reading too much or have too mixed of breed flock?

 

[Ridgerunner]

You are reading too much. Don't worry about that. If that were true, pea combed, rose combed, and walnut combed chickens would have been extinct thousands of years ago.

 

[ChickenJohn1]

OK, from the fertile egg photos I think I have some fertile eggs. My question is if they have been in the refrigerator will that degrade their hatch-ability?

If I am collecting eggs from a fertilized hen, do I keep them at room temperature, similar to what she would be doing while gather a clutch or put them in the fridge until I get ready to put them in the incubator?