First hatch

[guineanoob]

Hi! This is my first post so be gentle. I've incubated 12 eggs and had one hatch at 27, one at 28, and one at 29 days. I'm on day 31 and being my impatient self started to crack the others to find dead fully formed chicks =( What did I do wrong? I was at 98.5 degrees and 70-90% humidity. I stayed at 99.5 and 55/60% until day 24. I'm using a Styrofoam incubator with a fan and auto Turner. Should I have helped? Is it normal to have low hatch rates your first time? I'm so sad I feel like I killed them but the three keets are adorable!

 

[furry feet]

Did you have a good thermometer and hydrometer i know the smaller incubators are not the best or i should say the ones that come with them are not real good i own two of them dont even pay any attention to the ones that come with them there way off now i get about 90 percent hatch

 

[guineanoob]

I bought two thermometers that I went by that I sat next to the eggs as well as a hydrometer. They weren't expensive so maybe I need higher quality if I want to do this again?

 

[guineanoob]

The survivors

 

[R2elk]

Hi! This is my first post so be gentle. I've incubated 12 eggs and had one hatch at 27, one at 28, and one at 29 days. I'm on day 31 and being my impatient self started to crack the others to find dead fully formed chicks =( What did I do wrong? I was at 98.5 degrees and 70-90% humidity. I stayed at 99.5 and 55/60% until day 24. I'm using a Styrofoam incubator with a fan and auto Turner. Should I have helped? Is it normal to have low hatch rates your first time? I'm so sad I feel like I killed them but the three keets are adorable!

It is my opinion that if your hygrometer was accurate that you were running your humidity too high. At 55% to 60% humidity during incubation, it can lead to insufficient weight loss which translates to too small an air space during lockdown. This allows the keet to become so large that it doesn't have enough room to maneuver around and can't efficiently zip. It also decreases the amount of air in the shell and can cause suffocation.

Humidity above 70% during lockdown can also cause insufficient oxygen to be present which can lead to suffocation.

My recommendation would be to not go over 50% humidity during incubation and don't go over 70% humidity during lockdown.

Good luck.

 

[guineanoob]

Thank you! I think I read too many publications with varying humidity ranges.

 

[FrogRaku]

I went with what extension.org recommended - same temps/65% humidity and 80% at lockdown. I had a homemade styrofoam still air incubator and turned them 3 times a day by hand. I just used a digital thermometer/hygrometer for inside the home. (I was just trying incubating out, for the first time, so it was pretty basic.)

My humidity dipped a couple times and so did my temperature, but I had 80% hatch ratio. (The fertilized, unhatched died in the shell sometime between candling them at 10 days and 24 days.)

Different sites have different humidity reccomendations, so I'm sorry about your eggs/keets, but I don't really know if it was your humidity or if the keets just weren't strong enough to get out of their shell. Either way, it had to be pretty sad...