1 egg has started hatching a couple of days early and my broody seems to have freaked out and won't sit now!! I have put the in progress hatching egg under my eco glow flat heater with a damp paper towel over it to try and save it. Its breathing but no noise or other movements and about half in the shell. What do I do with the other 5 eggs if she won't sit on them again??!! Put them under heater with source of humidity? They are supposed to hatch sometime this week.... not 100% sure which day.
We had trouble with that this year as well. We didn't have an incubator setup so we brought them in and set them in a towel in a small box with a light. We manually checked the temp and kept it about 100 degrees with a small cup of water in the box. We managed to hatch three of the five eggs that way. The hen had apparently been off long enough that the eggs had cooled way down so it was a crap shoot whether any would hatch, but we managed to get three where they all would have been lost. I wanted to put the eggs under another hen but I was afraid they would hatch and she would abandon her nest the way the first hen did so we just did the best we could on our own. So far we have 12 surviving chicks this year and another 6 still being set. Puts us back up to a few too many chickens but some of our birds are in excess of 10 to 12 years old and are beginning to die off, time to get some new young blood into the flock again.
My hen killed 2 chicks yesterday and was off her eggs all day so I took the rest of the eggs inside and put them on a damp towel, in my crock pot with the lid on, and then put a lamp over it (I didn't turn the crockpot on). I had a digital thermometer inside to keep the temperature where it should be (we moved the lamp closer or farther to adjust). 2 chicks lived but we lost the other 3.
