First Incubation Attempt Begins Tonight!

[Toogoodoo]

I think I'm more excited than a kid at Christmas to put our eggs in our incubator tonight. It's been sitting and tonight is the night when I get home from work. We had a friend incubating eggs for us these last few times (she has a big, fancy 'bator lol - incubates chicks, ducks, turkeys, emu, geese, quail, etc) and decided we were going to start attempting our own - especially with our plans to grow the farm and intentions to be incubating a lot in the future. I know to not expect a 100% perfect experience, and I'm nervous about being lost in comparison to many of the veteran hatchers! ... even after reading all the different things that can go right/wrong - I'm always a worrier... when I got one of my German Shepherds as a 7 week old puppy, I worried about EVERYTHING with him, and it was just the stages of a normal growing puppy . But I am so super excited - I've been reading threads on here for a bit now (thanks BYC magazine from TSC for telling me there was a forum too!), the articles, googling up and down on top of it, and also realize that everyone has different things that work for them!

We are going to be incubating 13 eggs from our 2 black Australorp hens, and about 30 Cayuga duck eggs this go round. The friend that has been incubating for us has been incubating them together with success, so we are hopeful to have decent results too. Already looking at additional incubators to be able to incubate ducks, chicks, turkeys, and eventually quail and guineas. Have my sights set on a GFQ once we're able to save up for one, and have enough of our hens producing eggs to make such a big one worth it. Probably will acquire 2-3 more in the mean time - either an Incuview, or the Nurture Right 360 is a possibility when I get another Neighbors Club coupon from TSC .

Mostly will probably just ramble/update about how it's going in this thread, and I'm a spaz about taking pictures of EVERYTHING (I've had my phone for a year and there's over 4000 pictures on it - when I got the 126GB phone they said "you'll never make a dent in the storage" ), especially the animals growing at the farm, so don't mind me too much... just another crazy chicken lady Ready to set my Hatchabatch app to follow along for both chicks & ducklings and keep up with the process. It's been a LONG time (elementary school) since dealing with any type of incubating, (and I do remember it being exciting back then too).

This day is dragging - I'm ready to be home and setting eggs in!!!

 

[rita2paul]

good luck. i remember my first time hatching.

 

[Foxslayer16]

Definitelyget a incuveiw they are amazing

 

[Toogoodoo]

It has been incredibly hard to not check them constantly

I want to see something NOW lol. We stored them the same way we store them when we bring them to our friend to incubate and she has had success (speaking of, the first batch of Cayugas we brought her began hatching today ), so I'm hoping that they're good to go in that sense. I'm trying super hard to just wait until day 7 candling instead of wanting to check on them each night (first 2 days I limited it to 2-3 I looked at).

Of course the one bantam hen decided she wants to lay again now that the 'bator is started and full She pecks her eggs so we were going to collect them - she had 3 in there last week and pecked them all open.

I'm not the most patient person in the world lol ... same with exercising, I like to see results right away

 

[Toogoodoo]

We aren't thinking we'll end with good results, though it is early still. Can't see a single vein forming on any of the eggs (we've checked about 5 each at random). Did adjust temperature some last night, our new hygrometer/thermometer from Incubator Warehouse came in and has been running good. Not sure how much a difference that may have been making.

We forgot we had brought ~40 cayuga eggs to our friend to incubate, & that she got rid of all but 12-15 of them before putting them in (and so far still only 4 hatched yesterday. We'll be picking up a couple today, she gets to keep a couple for incubating for us). So we're becoming less hopeful on the batch we have incubating now ourselves too. Not seeing any type of activity in the chicken eggs either, and last night started day 4. We're still going to wait til day 7 at minimum before making decisions on them, and have continued to save new chicken & duck eggs (and storing them inside instead of the shed, even though our batch of chicken eggs stored in there hatched out perfectly fine last month).

Fingers crossed and we will see...

 

[Toogoodoo]

THERE WERE VEINSSSS Well, at least in one of the chicken eggs last night. Fiance said "lets just check one of each tonight, and still wait til day 7 to do all of them and get rid of what isn't appearing viable". Duck egg, nada . Chicken egg ...*looks* ... *looks again*.... "I SEE VEINS!!!" I think I took him by surprise lol I was so excited about it, and he was glad to see something more than just a glowing egg, or blood rings.

Still only 4 ducks hatched in our friend's 'bator, but she is seeing activity and there's definite development in some of the others so she's thinking they're just taking their time right now and giving it a little longer since they were bigger eggs than the ones that hatched. I dont think we had Muscovy in the egg bunch that went in the 'bator, but they might just be. We decided after awhile to just let the Muscovys sit, unfortunately the dog was the first one to find the nest this weekend, which was right next to the porch and we kept missing it (we'd been looking for a couple days for where she was bedded down), and they ate all 9 eggs she had in there

All hope is not lost

 

[Toogoodoo]

Candled all eggs last night. Every last duck egg showed nothing (well, except one that was full of dark stuff, pretty sure that was the one smelling bad in there too), so we tossed some back to them, the chickens, the pigs, and the dogs. Went to throw one to my dogs and managed to bounce it off my male GSD's head as he ran right in the path of my toss those were some hard eggs, fiance tossed one through the wire on one of the pens and it wedged itself in there without breaking open.

All of the chicken eggs are showing veins/development , and the bantam had begun to leave some more, so since we got rid of 37 duck eggs, we put 4 bantam and 4 Australorps in on the other side of the bator and should have a hatch date about 6 days past the original batch on those.

 

[Toogoodoo]

According to Hatchabatch, we are 62% through with batch #1!! They seem to be developing well thus far. At least from what little I know about development at this time.

Batch #2 is about a week in, "33%". Will be candling them tonight, I've managed to leave the eggs alone better the longer they are in there instead of wanting to look at them every 10 seconds lol.

We put in another 9 chicken eggs (mix from the Australorps & bantams), and 7 duck eggs from the calls last night. We are starting to think those are 2 females though. Might need to find them mate if so! Will be checking the auction this weekend, since that is where we originally got them from.

that we have chicks in another week (first batch due 6/7)!