Help- I MUST have done something wrong.....

[vonrow]

Yep, I fill the trenches. To make it easier to fill them I knocked out the inner "dam" on both sides to let water fill in the "outside" trays. Sure beats trying to get a squirt of water into those reservoirs once the eggs are all loaded into the incubator. Then I lay down 2 layers of paper towels. This not only makes for a muuuuch easier cleanup, but if I have to crack the incubator open for any reason I can dribble some warm water onto the towels and recover lost humidity in a matter of minutes versus hours. It also gives the newly hatched chicks some extra traction to get around once they hatch out. For the balloons, I fill them to about the size of grapefruits or softballs. They shrink down over a few days to the size of tennis balls.

 

[themenagerie]

Just curious..what was your humidity days 1-18? I had a similarly less than stellar hatch with fully formed chicks like you. I'm trying it again with lower humidity. Everything that I've read about still air temps lead me to believe that your temps weren't too high, but there's no harm in lowering it a bit.

 

[Kathy48653]

I filled the trenches and my humidity was 50-60% on days 1-18. After reading some of the forum responses to humidity I think that may have been what killed them. They pipped internally and there was a bunch of water in the air cell and they drowned. I'm starting another batch Monday. I'm going to keep the humidity low for the first 18 days.

 

[schneidercanet]

In the first 18 days the humidity should be in the 45% to 55% range. I hatched twice with a good success rate (80-90%) with my humidity between 50-55% most of the time. Of course there are differences between incubators, mine is forced air so I can't help you with that part. As for the dead chicks, that also happened to me, it's normal for that to happen in some cases, but not to the extent you described. You should wait a few more days to see if they hatch; in my first time, there was one that didn't hatch two days after they were due, so I assumed it was dead: I opened the egg in the air cell and it was alive, but quite underdeveloped. It didn't survive, but if I hadn't tampered with it may it would have. It's not good to remove the egg from the incubator after the 18th day. Sometimes there are abnormalities, once I had a hen the was sitting on the eggs and only one or two chicks (out of seven) hatched on day 21, but I left her there and they all hatched but one, some on day 24!