DON'T GIVE UP ON A COLD EGG!
I know that this thread is really old but I thought I would post for anyone reading now (as I recently did). I read this post last month after realising my broody bantam had accidentally been sitting in the wrong nest box for a day and a half/ two days! When I found the egg it was completely cold!
We had moved her and the egg to a separate area from the main flock two days prior. The separate area had two nesting boxes and although I'd checked her regularly since we moved her it wasn't until my partner said 'didn't we put her into the other box?' that the cogs in my head started to move and I realised she had moved and was sat in the wrong box! How stupid I am?! But we'd moved her in the night so I didn't clearly remember which box we'd put her in. I just assumed the next day when I saw her nestled all broody in the box that she was sitting on her egg. But alas, her egg had gone cold in the other box and she was sitting on absolutely nothing!
So first lesson of the day: Even though chickens are more intelligent than most people give them credit for, sometimes they can be incredibly dumb. Anyway...
So the egg was at day 13 of incubation when it had gone cold. I was absolutely devastated and obviously (for not realising she was sat in an empty box) blamed myself. My first reaction was 'It's stone cold, it must be dead. We'll have to smash the egg and "un-broody" her.' But me and my partner were both stood there feeling like we were about to commit murder so we decided to just put the egg back under her (and blocked up the empty box so she couldn't abandon it again!), in desperate hope that a miracle would occur and it would hatch.
That's when I went back inside and started reading this thread. In which all but a couple of posts say an egg can go cold for 1-4 hours but no more. So we waited and waited and (with not much hope at all I must admit) waited some more. It got to incubation day 21 and still nothing. All I'd noticed is that my normally very friendly hen had become much more aggressive in the last day or so. Squawking as soon as I even looked at her. Which made me wonder if something was happening. That, and the only other thing that stopped me giving up and taking her off the egg, was that I'd read one post on here or somewhere else saying that if an egg has gone cold (before incubation day 14) it will not die but simply delay hatching by the same amount of time it has gone cold for. Apparently this can work for an egg that's been cold for up to ten days! So I clung to this one bit of information and decided to give the egg a couple of extra days.
Lo and behold on day 23 I walk into the coop and I hear 'peep! peep! peep!'. The egg had hatched! Two days late but it hatched! Happy and healthy! The hatch was delayed by almost the exact time it went cold for. But that was all, just a delay. The chick is about 3 weeks old now and completely healthy!
So the moral of the story... Please, please don't assume that if an egg is cold it is dead! They are much hardier than we think! And incubation CAN be delayed! My chick is living proof!
