Hannycakes
Hatching
- Feb 10, 2019
- 4
- 3
- 4
Alright, little bit of back information here... we've been having really warm spells this winter, mixed with bouts of extreme cold (a week of nice, sunny 60+ degree weather followed by a week of below freezing daytime temps with overnight lows into single digits, then back up for a few days and back down, etc..). At the tail end of a warm spell one of my hens went broody right in time for it to get cold again. I didn't really expect her to stick it out as she is still pretty young and it just got so cold, but she did and she was determined as all cluck. After about 10-14 days (rough estimate because I'm not certain when she actually dedicated herself to setting) it warmed up enough that I finally caught her off the nest long enough to candle the eggs and sure enough they were growing, and surprise-surprise four of the seventeen eggs were duck eggs (my ducks are only about 6mo and I had only found a couple eggs from them before i found those sitting under my hen). Fast forward about six days later and I've been watching like a hawk and she had been doing great until another hen ousted her from her nest and my best guess is an egg got busted open in the process because I had a dead chick that didn't look quite there yet and my broody was out and about and wouldnt go back to the nest. I am absolutely not set up for incubation, but with as close as the eggs are I did my best to set something up with a heat lamp and a blanket inside a mid sized metal watering trough. I did candle the eggs, and most of them are mostly dark with good air pockets right where they should be, but no movement and the duck eggs are showing a fairly large dark spot with veins still and a good air pocket, but again no movement. I have an outside thermometer that transmits temp to an inside reader and I'm not certain how accurate it is for this, but I've managed to keep the temp largely between 97 and 102 with a few slips too high or too low that I've done my best to adjust for and I'm totally guessing at humidity. I nearly had a heart attack first thing this morning because the thermometer was reading 126 and the eggs were kind of hot to the touch but it really didn't take anything to cool them so I don't know how long the temp had spiked for or if it was even reading correctly. It's been just over 24 hours and it is stressing me out so much and I feel like it's a lost cause because I've still seen no sign of movement and I can't seem to find any definitive way to tell if my birds are still alive in their shells. To sum it up, I don't know how old the eggs are exactly, there was a time frame of about an hour and a half where they might have gotten way too cold before I moved them into my improvised incubator and they potentially got way too hot this morning. I just need some advice here.
