First Time Incubating - Stressed!

[MGG]

Actually @silkiekeeper I do agree with you. As long as it's not super high or super low for a long time, I think it's fine. The hen can't control it. It might be a nest in the desert or a nest being rained on. They always manage to hatch chicks.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Hi, Kizmet, welcome to the forum. Glad you joined.

I suspect you aren't much more relaxed after all these responses. Let's see if I can help you out a little bit.

There is no one perfect humidity for all of us. There are a lot of different factors involved. Each egg is different with different porosity and thickness of the egg material inside. How long they were stored and the storage conditions can make a difference. The longer they are stored and the lower the storage humidity the more moisture they lose before incubation begins. The elevation above sea level can make a difference. The temperature and moisture level of the air going into the incubator has an effect. Each incubator is different, I mean a lot more than still air versus forced air. When the professionals move an incubator from one area in the incubating room to another they have to tweak the incubator for maximum efficiency. This sounds pretty hopeless but its not. Nature was kind in that there is a wide difference in humidities that will work really well. Humidity is important but you don't have to be that precise. Somewhere in the acceptable window will work. If your air cells are in the ballpark of where they should be you should be doing fine.

Humidity is all about moisture loss. If the egg loses too much moisture or too little moisture the chick can have trouble hatching. The commercial hatching operations have spent a lot of money trying to determine what the best humidity is. These hatcheries may be using incubators that hold 120,000 eggs and may hatch 1,000,000 chicks a week all year long. Just a small difference in hatch rate can have an impact on their bottom line. So they go to a lot of trouble to tweak each incubator to get it as good as they can. With out smaller numbers of eggs set a small difference in hatch rate is not that noticeable, but I still want to hatch as many of them as I can. Since each egg is different, you are trying for the conditions where most eggs hatch. Some eggs can fall outside of that window.

My suggestion is to settle on a humidity and see what happens. When the hatch is over evaluate your hatch. Open unhatched eggs and see if you can determine what, if anything, went wrong. Then, if necessary, adjust your humidity next hatch. You may find these links helpful in evaluating your hatch.

Mississippi State Incubation Troubleshooting

http://extension.msstate.edu/content/trouble-shooting-failures-egg-incubation

Illinois Incubation troubleshooting

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

For what it is worth the professionals get about a 90% hatch rate of the eggs they set. This is after they reject some eggs as not good to set, either from size, shape, porosity, cracks, whatever. They look at it from two different aspects, what is caused by things before the eggs started incubation and things that happened during incubation. Typically each is about 5% of the total. If you look at those links there are a lot of things that affect hatchability. It's not just temperature and humidity.

This probably won't help you relax. Incubating can be stressful, not just your first try. But your first is typically your worst, you're sure you are killing those chicks with every thing you do or don't do. We've been through it before. But it's amazing how tough those eggs really are. Often they hatch in spite of what we do. Those windows for humidity and other things are often fairly wide.

Good luck!