incubation failures. why?

[chippysq]

Last year I incubated several different types of eggs. Chickens, turkeys, and quail. My hatch rates where in the 70-80% range. When winter came I packed the incubator up and waited for spring. When spring arrived I took out the incubator, cleaned it and started to incubate some quail eggs. Out of 120 eggs had 2 hatch. Put another 120 quail eggs in got 37 but 15 died hrs after hatching in the incubator. So I tried to hatch another batch of quail eggs of 100 from a different farmer and same results. Had 10 hatch. I then gave up with quail and went to turkey and duck eggs. So I could candle and watch the progress. I candled every egg and the progress looked great up too hatch date where I only had 1 duck hatch. The rest of the birds died inside there shells before they could even pip. I'm doing the same thing I did last year but getting bad results. I even put a 2nd thermometer in there. Any tips?

 

[CGinJCMO]

I dont have any answers for you but I'd like to hear any possible reasons. I had a great first hatch and the next two have been failures. My last one is like what you described...hatch and then die. (last batch was in a classroom setting that wasn't my class so I had even less control). Both of these last two batches, I had one yolky chick smear yolk over the rest of the eggs. My first issue is probably preventing the yolky germy eggs (any chick really) from getting on unhatched eggs.

CG