It is upsetting that you've had this issue twice in the past few weeks. I've only had this once in all my years of hatching with broody hens. A thin shelled egg broke, probably by the hen walking on them, and got goop on the others. I lost that entire hatch even though I tried to clean the eggs and the hen. Good luck with your efforts. That was really upsetting because I had timed that hatch to coincide with my granddaughter visiting. I'm glad I had not told anybody what I was trying because she sure did not get to experience that hatch but was not disappointed. She just did not know.
I don't understand why you would have maggots inside. That egg had to have been broken a few days for flies to be able to lay eggs inside to hatch into maggots. What usually happens to cause eggs to go bad is that bacteria gets inside and multiply. Bacteria is usually the problem for eggs going bad. If your eggs are breaking you might check for thin shells.
Yes, it's definitely upsetting. I don't think it's an issue of thin eggs for us. For the hen, I'm really unsure what happened. We move the eggs from the main coop to her broody coop and everything seemed fine. And then it was clear awhile later the whole hatch was disgusting. But like I said, she was so clearly a good broody we bought her chicks and she's super happy.
For the turkey Jenny.... I'm really not sure either. We have 5 Jennies and I think she ended up with a few too many eggs. But once she went broody she basically stayed there all day, every day so we never got to check on her eggs. We had two Jennies broody, so removed all other Jennies and toms to another coop.
One of Jenny 1s eggs was a early hatch, and we think Jenny 2 likes the peeps. She decided to switch to sit right next to Jenny 1 (in the same nest box). Basically, she seems to like walking the chicks around (we have 7 now, more on the way) more than sitting on the eggs, while Jenny 1 just wants to sit.
Anyway, due to this nonsense we moved some of Jenny 2s egg to our already going incubator, and then moved some to Jenny 2s new position next to Jenny 1.
I think the broken, maggot egg was just squashed because we ended up with 2 jennys sharing duties on an extra large clutch.
Then, we removed quite a few due to the stink. And I also removed two other broken ones yesterday (very sad, one was clearly very developed with a dead chick hanging out, the other was undeveloped).
Anyway. They share 7 chicks right now, and still have maybe 10 eggs, though we don't know if anymore will hatch. We have another 30 or so in an incubator, 2 have hatched, 5 are currently pipped. And then our other incubator has 7 more eggs from the jenny that were stinky. We don't have high hopes for them but they were clearly developed. The peroxide misring has helped but the entire clutch still has a slight odor... We also removed a few due to maple syrup like ooze... I don't mind giving the rest a chance until we're absolutely sure they're dead.
Anyway, this long essay was basically to say I think the maggot egg was due to Jenny 2 wanting to babysit more than brood resulting in broken eggs.
