Help! bad smell in bator on lockdown!

[scooby]

hatch day is today 5/11......but there is nothing yet. i locked them down wed. night........well yeasterday i noticed a very bad smell coming from the bator i can only assume that one is dead........since i am on lock down do i dare open it to try to find the bad egg and remove it..........there is no external pipping, but i dont know if there is any internal if that makes a difference.

I candled tuesday night before lock down and out of 6 eggs there where 4 that had definate movement, the other 2 i was unsure of, they where developed fully but i could not for sure tell if there was movement so i put them back in the bator. so i am guessing it is one of these two that went bad........


Also today is hatch day, but 1) these are eggs that broody got off of, but i set them under her on 4/20........she got off of them with about a week left to go, the ones that did not make it after put in the bator i already got rid of and all these at one point in the last 9 days where alive in the bator...But the temps in the bator have been low between 93 -97 the first few days in the bator untill i got it stable at 99 the last 4 days, so will this make a diffrence in hatch time, could they just hatch a few days late cause of the low temps, i am starting to get worried.

so 1) should i remove bad egg even though i am on lockdown?
and 2) could they hatch late cause of low temps?
and 3) Should i add vent holes? it has non, what about humidity?

 

[cmoore333]

I too noticed a bad smell yesterday, we candled before lock down and I thought we found it, but apparently not (some of mine where to dark to see when we candled) This morning I awoke to one chick already hatched and another trying (now have two little bundles in there with a smelly egg)day 21 is actully tommorow so only off by one day

 

[scooby]

anyone know what i should do!!!!

 

[scooby]

OK one is pipping now,started a few hrs ago.....going pretty slow, it is my "special" bantam...but the smell is overwhelming, will the chicks be OK with this raunchy smell or might it hurt them.....I am sitting 2 ft away from the bator and it is just gagging me and eyes burning!!!!! and thats with almost the whole thing covered with a towel

 

[Snakedoc]

With the caveat that I am far from an expert on hatching bird eggs (don't you love it when someone starts to give you advice, but opens with a sentence like that?) ...


I have hatched a lot of reptile eggs, and these need 100% humidity, the entire incubation, and if you turn them at any point during development, you risk damaging the embryo. So, they are essentially in "permanent lockdown." However, I do open the 'bator up weekly to check on them and will remove any bad eggs as soon as they are obviously bad.

If your 'bator smells so bad that you are standing two feet away from it and can't stand it, I would get the stinky badness out ASAP. I just can't imagine that the good ones would be harmed by that brief exposure to cooler, higher humidity air, but I'd be VERY worried that, if the smell is *that* bad, they could be exposed to some seriously noxious stuff in their first sensitive hours of life. (Plus, you don't want something that stinky in your house!)

Hope your good babies all make it out OK!

 

[scooby]

i am worried about the lock down phase cause i have read that if you open it up during lock down that the membrane could possible "shrinkwrap" the chick as they are pipping..........It is now morning and my batnam is still not through although she has manage to crack it a little more and we can hear her peeping a little louder and if we look in the correct direction with the right light we can see a little movement.
we also have another one starting to pip, woke up this morning it is cracked......
My husband swears the smell is not that bad but i think it is,

 

[scooby]

ok we have got 2 chicks now, batnam hatched sat. at around 3:00 and at around 5:00 dogs knocked over the whole bator tossing chickie back into the water and spilling it everywhere and tossing the eggs we had no choice but to open it retrieve chickie from the water dish put new paper towels in it refill the water and turn eggs back over, but then beacause of all this we started to have problems with temp. and humidity and have had to open it several times to adjust it, then chickie started panting cause the temp was skyrocketing up to 102 and (and the humidity fell to 30)....so i was worried about her all night finally went to bed around 3:00 and by 6:00 sunday morning we had another hatch, chickie 2...I decided to remove them a few hrs later we are still trying to get temps and humidity right again it was as low as 93 today and then 102, humidity was 30 then 50 then 60 back to 40, i think we finally got it set around the 60's. we have 4 more eggs but nothing , these eggs where the farthest from the light and since we had such problems with temp this last week could they just be behind, how long should i give them? or would it be ok to candle them tonight since non of them have externally pipped? we know at least one is dead cause it still smells bad, but i'm hoping they all arn't dead.......
By the way my husband, the non chicken loving guy is now addicted to the bator and want's to "improve" it and set another batch ........LOL so funny when i wake up at 7 in the morning and find him sitting in a chair staring at the eggs! ....LOL I Think he's hooked!!!

 

[TopHatsNSpats]

Sometimes I think we just overthink this stuff. There is so much information out there, about how don't do this or they ALL WILL DIE, etc...Remember in nature, the mother hen gets off the nest to poop, eat, etc and the eggs still hatch. What I am saying here is that I think the concern about a few moments of temperature and humidity change is not going to usually be fatal. The bad smell means you have a bad egg in there, I am betting you know this but the problem is finding it. I am a little amazed (and you should be a LOT grateful!) that the dogs knocking the incubator askew didn't cause that egg to break. You do NOT want to have to clean out that incubator after a bad egg explodes, because when they do, the stuff literally goes EVERYWHERE, into every nook and cranny, and since egg is very sticky, it is almost impossible to get the stuff out of all the crevices. This can not only make your incubator smelly, it sets you up for bacterial problems that can ruin future hatches. If it were me (with a caveat that I am not a vet but I've been raising chickens a very long time) since you only have a few eggs left, I would definitely carefully and quickly pull each one out and candle it to find the bad egg, (or eggs) and remove it ASAP. Because these are the probabilities: the slower hatching eggs are often slower for a reason, either the chick is malformed, or poor doer, or in a bad position in the egg, etc. Unless these eggs are extremely valuable, like albino mandarin ducks or something, it is not worth risking the incubator and future hatches to a bad egg rupturing because they frequently do it with FORCE and the mess is... *shudders* Hope this helps

 

[scooby]

well we did decide to candle the remaining eggs last night and we found one that had definatley died and had fluid moving around in it, so it went and now the bator smells much better, I did decide to put back the remaining 3 eggs and give them a few more days, i could not tell weather they where moving or whether i was seeing things so we figured a few more days, they where full though, so fully developed for sure, the temps have been predominately low, and a few time very high so thats why i though maybe they where just slower cause the low temps these past 9 days.

 

[TopHatsNSpats]

Very possible. Since you have removed the culprit, it's no problem to give the others a little longer to see if they will go on and pip now tht the temps have stopped fluctuating. Good luck!