I was incubating some mutt eggs in my bator and kept the temp at 99.8-100.0 (26% humidity, no water)the whole time, no water. A friend was over last night and I was telling her I was DRY HATCHING...she said , "no, you can dry incubate, but need the humidity the last few days so the chicks are lubricated aand can spin around to pip! It made perfect sense to me, but I was pannicked because 2 of the eggs had pipped that morning, 3 days early and I figured I had time to raise the humidity,(So we quickly added some water and the humidity was about 32%) but when we looked at them, they were zipping a larger zip than normal. (I really thought I read here about dry HATCHING) so we had to "help them hatch with warm water and peel the dried up eggshell and membranes off them. The poor things were like glue, all hardened up. Once we got them out of their shells and back in the bator, i sucked all the water out again with a syringe.There was another egg in there that had come out of the coop on the 29th and looked to be developing so I also put that in the bator because it was off to the side and cold, but I could see a shadow in it. So here is the end of the story,I checked on the "glue chix" tonight when I got home, they are active and peeping annd are really tiny...but, there is another chick in there that dry hatched from thaat cold egg!!! he is double the size of the others and zipped and hatched himslf sometime during the day today because there was no pip in that egg yesterday. Has anyone ever heard of a dry hatch??? I am so happy they all seem to be doing well, the dad is a sebrite and the mom of the tiny ones i believe to be my black cochin and the big chick is probably from the ighter mixed breed hen I have because it has some lighter coloring along the sides. I will add pics tonight or tommorw!
