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I'm so sorry that this happened!! First, I just want to say that I have never hatched geese. But I do successfully hatch chickens, peafowl, quails and currently trying my hand at ducks. From your pictures I do think I know what went wrong. I believe that your humidity was to high. Having your humidity to high throughout incubation will prevent your air cells from growing sufficiently. This leads the baby to grow to big and not be able to get out of the shell. There is no "right" number that your humidity should be. You must monitor your air cells to make sure they are growing properly. I trace my air cells with a pencil once a week throughout incubation. Having the lines traced gives me a good way to measure the growth for the week. I would definitely try again and lower your humidity. You can start around 35% and then check your growth from there. If they look to big after the first week then increase by about 5-10%. If they look to small (which I don't think they would at that %) you can decrease a little. Also, how long were they pipped before you made the whole? There are times when this is necessary but keep in mind that when they pip they start breathing oxygen and releasing Carbon dioxide. As the carbon dioxide increases and the oxygen decreases and it cause their neck to twitch, which then makes them pip the egg with the egg tooth. So normally they will naturally pip as they run out of oxygen. But sometimes this process can not take place properly for one reason or another and a safety hole can be made. It's best to make a tiny hole, the size of a pen tip. This will allow oxygen to enter without exposing to much membrane and drying it out. Please let me know if you have any questions!! I really hope you try again! I will try and find a picture of how big the air cells should be for geese. Here's a picture for chicken eggs, it's based on a 21 day incubation but the theory is the same.Complete disaster. I made my first artificial goose incubation following this great post explanation. 8 eggs from my one gooses at home. After 1 week, I removed one infertile egg. At day 14, another egg was stopped and was removed. 6 remained until the hatching time when everything went wrong, and I don't know why, that's the reason of this post...seeking help for the future. Since I am not an expert on the subject, but work in a lab, I used for incubation an laboratory incubator with temperature and humidity fine control. Based on the post I choose 37.5ºC and 55ºC until day 21 and increase the humidity after that to 70%. (The incubator is closed, with no light). On the 25-26th day, the first egg showed the first internal pipping (everything seems corresponding to the post description), but then I felt that the baby geese could not breath, and I made a small external pipping to help him breathing. The day after it was dead. Three others had another problem, the geese where not able to make the internal pipping and died between the 28 and 30th day. Again it seemed a problem of suffocation. Today the last one also died. Yesterday I saw the internal pipping and made the artificial external pipping. Today on the morning it seemed with difficulties to bread, and died also during the afternoon. I opened the eggs but I can not understand what went wrong. Can anyone help me? (The first 3 images were with internal pipping (28 days), the other 4 were without (30 days))[COLOR=B42000]
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That is so strange!! I'm glad you were able to free most of them!
