Hatching questions

[Bryam]

So could I leave baby button quails in an incubator for 15 hours? Or is 12 hours the max for them?

 

[dc3085]

Sometimes you have to leave them in a little longer. With buttons I snag them out as soon as they dry off, but only if there are no other eggs pipped. Once eggs pip I make anybody already hatched, wait it out, until the main body is hatched out. All it takes is cracking the door on pipped eggs to shrink wrap their membranes. Shrink wrapped chicks usually don't make it.

The real dictating factor is pipped eggs. Chicks communicate in the shell to organize the hatch, it's that peeping people sometimes hear out of unhatched eggs. Because of this most of what is going to hatch will hatch in a short window of time (you may have already noticed this). Until that main body of the hatch has completed and dried out I don't open the incubator for coturnix. With buttons it's always a judgement call, but usually an easier one to make, since there are usually so many less eggs being hatched when doing buttons.

Basically you have to decide what's best for that large group of eggs that are going to hatch. Removing one or two chicks who hatched early could condemn the rest to die if they're pipped. You have to hope the early hatchers dry out before the rest pip their shells, or they'll just have to wait it out.

To directly answer your question I wouldn't push it too far past 16 hours with buttons, if it can be avoided.

 

[Bryam]

Ok

 

[double BB quail]

Here

are my only ones first time quail owner and hatcher.

 

[double BB quail]

Don't know what kind yet. I think one is a brown by thee color and don't know about the yellow one.

 

[dc3085]

Edited to make sense because I wasn't paying enough attention to what I was doing

The brown one is a pharaoh or wild type bird. The other is a jumbo white, which most people call Texas A&Ms