I need help to know if my chicken will hatch

chickenhelp11

Hatching
Jul 26, 2025
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I am incubating one chicken egg and I am on day 22 it internally piped on day 20 around 3 . We thought it may not be alive still but then today I saw it shaking very fast for about 30 seconds. What does that mean?
 
It's trying to pip is my guess. I've hatched many eggs and never saw one shake for more than a second. I'd leave it go another day. Especially if you haven't calibrated your incubator settings.
 
It's trying to pip is my guess. I've hatched many eggs and never saw one shake for more than a second. I'd leave it go another day. Especially if you haven't calibrated your incubator settings.
If I leave it for one more day, and I does nothing, what should I do?
 
Candle and make a small air hole. Honestly at this point I would remove the egg at the air sac part and leave the rest that is at chick level. Then mist or oil the membrane to check for veins.

I say open the eggshell in case they look like they pipped but their beak is still below the membrane. You would want to gently tear/cut near their beak in that case.

(And for those hatching duck eggs, a beak showing isn't a yay they can breath sign. The membrane had to be taken away from the nostrils. Just had a duckling die because I thought it was breathing through it's mouth and it still managed to drown.)


Keep misting the membrane when checking on it but keep it in a high humidity incubator.

When the beak is out, take a small syringe, q tip or even your finger and get a drop of save a chick or similar and place it at end of beak. Give them electrolytes every once in awhile but don't do it a lot at once (say, 3 drops max.)

If it doesn't make an progress in 12-24 hours, then you can start making a crack in the egg in a straight line down so the chick can more easily push it's way out. Sometimes the eggshell just has more calcium than average.
 
If I leave it for one more day, and I does nothing, what should I do?
I presume your incubator temp is off a little as just being off a half of a degree can set them back several hours or even a day. This is why I'm not suggesting you do anything yet. If you open that egg now and hit a vein or it's got a lot of yolk, you could kill it. If you wait, the worst thing that happens is it died because it was too weak to get out itself.

If by tomorrow its not out, then I'd start a hole in the big end where you saw the internal pip.

Is your humidity up to 70%?
 

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