how long will she sit on dud eggs

[Edenjht]

My chicken has hatched three eggs and has about 10 more under her and it 1.5 weeks after the due date when will she get off of them. I am pretty sure they are all duds. What should I do?

 

[chooks4life]

If you're sure it's over a week and a half after the due date, they're duds and you should throw them. Once they die they begin to rot generally quite rapidly and soon enough they will explode and while most of us are familiar with the rotten eggs smell, there's nothing quite like an egg that developed partially then rotted, it's worse than any non-fertile rotten egg smell by far. The stinking muck will be very difficult to completely clean from your hen and chicks and nest and coop, it permeates skin and feathers somewhat. Also she'll consume some trying to clean her feathers and that's able to make her quite ill.

If you're not absolutely sure of their incubation date you can torch/candle them to check for development but otherwise... I'd throw them. Sometimes when a chick developed but died before hatch it remains looking like there was nothing wrong until it rots, so you may see some apparently normal chicks if you chuck the eggs, but if you're sure of the date then don't worry about it, they were definitely dead. It sounds to me like there's a wide margin of time elapsed and your eggs are probably dead.

The instinct levels differ in hens as in all domestic species and nobody can guarantee she will or won't get off the eggs even if they start exploding. It's a strike against her potential as a mother, the fact that she's remained on the eggs for this long when she's already hatched chicks. They need exercise to grow well, being hatched by a hen who remains on a clutch for over a week can set them back and leave them weaker than they should have been. If she's not a proven mother I'd watch her very carefully to see that she does everything she should including snuggling them at night because some hens change once they're off the clutch and have no further tolerance for the chicks, and just get back to life as usual as though there were no chicks hatched, or just go find another clutch to set. Maternal instinct in domestic chooks can fail at any level or stage or be incomplete in any aspect due to us having bred it out of many breeds and used artificial incubation and separate rearing to propagate many breeds. It doesn't take very many generations of interfering in instinct expression and stimuli to alter or remove once-normal behaviors.

Best wishes.

 

[Edenjht]

Thank you chooks4life that is very helpful and also, she was not very good at keeping her eggs under her. Sometimes she would let a couple sit out from under her then get back on them so I wasn't expecting a very high hatching rate.

 

[chooks4life]

That's an important observation... Some eggs if healthy enough can cope with an abnormally prolonged incubation period with far more periods of being let to chill than other eggs, but a week and a half is a bit long for most cases...

Best wishes.