Marty, congrats on the new hatches!
Iain, yes the shoes work wonders on the curled feet. Sooner the better to get them on, watch for straddle leg as they slide in the shoes more often.
Erin...x1000 what Marty said. If the bator is smelling you have something going wrong. If you can put the eggs in another bator I would fill a storage box with a hot water, a couple of drops of soap and a cap full of bleach. Submerge the bator bottom (assuming its styro) and weight down with a brick or something heavy. Let it soak 10-15 minutes. Scrubb and rinse with hot water. Then you can air dry it. The top you will have to just hand scrub to protect the heating element.
Aaajjss .... You are early in incubation, I wouldn't raise the humidity at all. I actually run ours much lower than that until they internally pip. If I run it that high I end up loosing eggs to too much fluid left at hatch.
Hope everyone had a relaxing weekend and lovely mothers day. We have an EE chicken order hatching to ship this week. Goslings leaving for their new homes again this week too. We even have a couple of goslings extra this week to list for sale.
The bobcat managed to rip a welded wire door off a building (similar to the wire on the pet kennels) this weekend. Hubby lost a female adult French white Scovy as she panicked and headed for the pasture. Our male Pyr was on it, but the cat went back over the fence, the poor duck tried to go through the fence and broke her neck from what we could tell.
So we cut wood to build solid doors for all three stalls on that building. They have double hinges and double latches on each. No more break ins going to happen now. We have to cut vents and screen the, in now though to give extra ventalation. Luckily the building has airflow soffits that are covered in window screen and hardware cloth. So will do the same for the new vent windows we cut and build.
Well on our way to having half of the front fenced in as well as the gates done on the driveway. Had one too many "drop in" customers even though the signs say open Sat only. Now during the week I won't have anyone pulling up the drive unwanted.