Hi all, just joined and need some emergency advice.
I'm incubating button quail eggs for the first time. Today is day 4 of the incubation process, so very early days. I candled one egg this morning and saw a tiny red speck with little veins inside, but didn't check the rest because it was very cold this morning and I didn't want them to chill (they're the smallest eggs I've ever dealt with).
When I checked and rotated them at 10am, everything was as it should be. Come 2pm for the next rotation, and I noticed the temperature wasn't up to the 38C it was set to. I have one of those cheap manual incubators that you have to turn yourself. When I was first warming it up 5 days ago it had a weird period where the heater was running but no heat was coming out, then after an hour it 'woke up' and started actually giving off heat again. This should have been my first indicator that something was amiss, because it has never done that before.
It's been 2 hours and the incubator was still sitting at a room temperature of 24C, so I've had to scrap the incubator and rather urgently stuff the eggs in my bra (unorthodox, I know, but I have no other viable sources of heat available) while I wait for another incubator to deliver. As you can imagine I'm quite gutted, as these had (at least one confirmed) signs of life. What is the reasonable amount of time that these eggs can go without the necessary heat required? It's been at least 3 hours since this batch had from not having the right temps. Has it been too long already, have I lost any potential for these eggs to have survived? Do I keep at it with them and wait for my new incubator or do I scrap these guys and go buy a new clutch?
I'm incubating button quail eggs for the first time. Today is day 4 of the incubation process, so very early days. I candled one egg this morning and saw a tiny red speck with little veins inside, but didn't check the rest because it was very cold this morning and I didn't want them to chill (they're the smallest eggs I've ever dealt with).
When I checked and rotated them at 10am, everything was as it should be. Come 2pm for the next rotation, and I noticed the temperature wasn't up to the 38C it was set to. I have one of those cheap manual incubators that you have to turn yourself. When I was first warming it up 5 days ago it had a weird period where the heater was running but no heat was coming out, then after an hour it 'woke up' and started actually giving off heat again. This should have been my first indicator that something was amiss, because it has never done that before.
It's been 2 hours and the incubator was still sitting at a room temperature of 24C, so I've had to scrap the incubator and rather urgently stuff the eggs in my bra (unorthodox, I know, but I have no other viable sources of heat available) while I wait for another incubator to deliver. As you can imagine I'm quite gutted, as these had (at least one confirmed) signs of life. What is the reasonable amount of time that these eggs can go without the necessary heat required? It's been at least 3 hours since this batch had from not having the right temps. Has it been too long already, have I lost any potential for these eggs to have survived? Do I keep at it with them and wait for my new incubator or do I scrap these guys and go buy a new clutch?