**** Exploding egg emergency ****

[MallyCat22]

Hatching shipped eggs is Definitely diffuctult. I ordered 12 bantam cochin eggs. Two of them were cracked and today when i candled the remaining 10 only 5 of them looked to be making progress.

Guess thats what you get! Even with my little banty sitting on them guess it can never be perfect. Darn post office people. well good luck!

 

[ConnorMayasMom]

I know...I just tried shipped eggs for our first ever hatch and out of 10 got 3...bummer....but still very happy with those that made it. Funny though, I ordered 3 of 3 kinds of different breeds and 1 was a friend's local (non-shipped) egg. 3 of the same breed hatched, (1 died near hatch) and 2 were successful. Neither of the others pipped. Funny that one breed would all hatch...and none of the others....hmmm

 

[Rare Feathers Farm]

EWWWW!

So how old was that egg--usually it takes them a lot longer than 7 days before they explode!

 

[Stevenson]

Quote:
Well, the shipper was kind enough to include some extra eggs that were just over a week old at shipping since I had room in my incubator. She said that she had hatched them as old as 2 weeks before and she wasn't going to be using them. Then the mail took 5 days to deliver.....so...I guess they could have been 19 days since they were laid....but 7 days in the incubator (only 6 eggs of the 24....those 6 have been all removed now)

 

[Rare Feathers Farm]

Quote:
Well, the shipper was kind enough to include some extra eggs that were just over a week old at shipping since I had room in my incubator. She said that she had hatched them as old as 2 weeks before and she wasn't going to be using them. Then the mail took 5 days to deliver.....so...I guess they could have been 19 days since they were laid....but 7 days in the incubator (only 6 eggs of the 24....those 6 have been all removed now)

So that egg could have been 26+ days old?

 

[Stevenson]

Quote:
Well, the shipper was kind enough to include some extra eggs that were just over a week old at shipping since I had room in my incubator. She said that she had hatched them as old as 2 weeks before and she wasn't going to be using them. Then the mail took 5 days to deliver.....so...I guess they could have been 19 days since they were laid....but 7 days in the incubator (only 6 eggs of the 24....those 6 have been all removed now)

So that egg could have been 26+ days old?

No...more like 19 days old since it was laid....was in the incubator on or around day 12.

 

[RachaelS]

Well based on this I pulled the 5 I was keeping "just in case" hard to give up on them even though I know they are not viable. I wish you the best! you have had about the same luck as me. Praying tonight for the both of us.

 

[yook2000]

There were still 12 eggs remaining in the incubator yesterday. My father who raised pigeon for many years told me to open the eggs whenever it pecked or not. I did that. 6 survive, and 6 died.
I just wanted to tell you what my faterh in law told me and what I did.

I candled the eggs and found where the air cell was. Then use a ballpen to break the shell a bit above the center of the air cell. After that I used the toothpick to open the eggs, only the part above the air cell, very carefully. Then I see if the eggs/birds still were alive. If there was a bird alive, and I could still see the vas under the velum, I just left them in the incubator. And my father told me to give one or two drops of milk or glucose water to the bird's peak, giving the energy to the weak birds. After the vas was dry, I would do the things below. If I saw the vas was dry under the velum, I used the toothpick to break the velum, and helped the bird's head out of the shell. This step is very important. My father told me not to take off all the shells, just help the head out and let the bird get out completely by itself. This is the first time I did that. If I can do more carefully, I think I can save more birds. As some of them were hurt and brooding when I broke the velum. Becasue some vas were not dry completley when I did that.

What I think is that did help me to get more birds, especially when hatching the eggs by shipping. I ordered quails eggs on ebay before, and just let the birds came out by themself. And finally I got a lot of birds dead in the eggs, even they alread pecked the shells.

That is just what I did today and hope that would help. I know many pepole suggest not to do anything for help. But I think if we do somthing, at least, we can give them some chance to survive.

 

[Stevenson]

I am going to continue to post in this thread to let everyone know the final outcome of this hatch because when I searched this topic I couldn't find out whether the remaining eggs hatched when people had an egg that exploded. The one real positive that I have is that I am incubating in a homemade incubator (24"x24" inside) and the egg exploded down, meaning nothing got on the other eggs. I am hoping that the large area inside also helped to dissipate the bacteria.

I candled again tonight and all 10 eggs still have chicks dancing around inside. I removed 13 more eggs that were for sure either clear or that had a blood ring. I am not taking any chances going forward.

 

[Stevenson]

Another update.

Of the 10 eggs that were developing at the time of the exploding egg, it appears that only one has stopped. I can see definite movement in 9 of the eggs...4 of them are on day 15 and 5 are on day 12. I will be moving the 4 to the hatching box on day 18. I just got a used hovabator 1602N for free that I will be installing a fan in and using to hatch them. The other 5 will remain in the homemade incubator until they hatch.