Help With Broody

[Let There Be Light]

So cute!Also for breed, she looks like some type of D'anver. Maybe a quail D'anver or something.

Yes, she's a quail D'anver!

 

[Let There Be Light]

So I checked the other five eggs today. Two were dead/rotten, one was infertile, one was fully formed and would've lived had I opened the egg just two/three days ago , but the fifth one is still alive! I had candled it and it looked like just a bunch of liquid, so I thought it was just infertile or dead like the other ones. I started peeling the egg shell off to make sure, and it started bleeding a little bit so I stopped, then it moved around a little!
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/emergency-chick.1497968/

 

[Let There Be Light]

Buhk Buhk and her chick and keets had a lot of fun outside today!

 

[Eireannach]

I am new to this forum and new to hens. I live in the Philippines and I started with my hens two months ago when I purchased two Rhode Island Reds and one rooster. One of the hens has now laid 20 eggs in her nest but she doesn't appear to be sitting on the clutch to hatch them. I don't know what to do at this stage. Is it unlikely that the hen will sit on the eggs? What should I do with the eggs? Is it too late to take them to an incubator? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[NatJ]

I am new to this forum and new to hens. I live in the Philippines and I started with my hens two months ago when I purchased two Rhode Island Reds and one rooster. One of the hens has now laid 20 eggs in her nest but she doesn't appear to be sitting on the clutch to hatch them. I don't know what to do at this stage. Is it unlikely that the hen will sit on the eggs? What should I do with the eggs? Is it too late to take them to an incubator? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

It generally works better if you start a new thread for your question, instead of adding to an existing thread.

For your eggs, there are many hens that never go broody, some hens that go broody only in the spring, and some hens that go broody frequently all year long.

A hen goes broody when she feels like it, and there is not much you can do to change it. I do not know if your hen is likely to go broody or not.

Yes, you could put the eggs in an incubator, and quite a few will probably be able to develop and hatch. Eggs that were laid within a week are most likely to hatch, but eggs that are older will often hatch as well. Since you probably cannot tell which eggs are how old, I would just put them all in and see.

You can candle the eggs first, to see if any chicks have started to develop (not likely, unless the weather happened to be the perfect temperature), and to check for cracks in the shell (do not try to incubate cracked eggs.)

If you candle the eggs, you might be able to tell fresher ones from older ones by the size of the air cell: it gets bigger over time. So the eggs with smaller air cells were laid more recently and are more likely to hatch, and the ones with larger air cells are older and are less likely to hatch (but they might hatch anyway.)

You can candle again after a week or so, to see which ones are actually developing and discard the others.

To candle the eggs, use a bright light (flashlight or cell phone light) in a dark room. Hold the light and the egg so the light shines into the egg but not anywhere else, and you can sort-of see what is inside the egg. I'm guessing you will be able to see the air cell (at the big end of each egg), and the yolk might look like a shadow in the middle. Cracks in the shell are usualy quite obvious, too. When they have been in the incubator for about a week, a developing chick would look like a blob with veins extending out in all directions, and ones that do not develop will still look like they did at first. Later yet, the chick will be a big dark blob that fills almost the entire egg, and the air cell will be a big empty space at the big end of the egg. The internet has lots of pictures of candling eggs at various stages of incubation.