Sad news from our house - due to mother nature, ice and snow we had a power outage and i lost 57 hatching eggs in the incubatorsbetween tuesday 3am and later yesterday night when the power came back on at out house.... BUT two RIR's were saved and pipped around 4:30 this morning. They were the ones in the center of the pile we were trying to keep warm with warmed up hot water bottles(at least the gas stove came on) I'm gonna call them Samson and Rambo cause they are tough little guys to struggle thru this !!!
Ouch! That sucks, big time. Sorry to hear of it. That is an entire flock, gone in one fell swoop. But, it happens. There are no guarantees in Life and it sounds like you are taking it well. Best of luck to Rambo and Samson.
Are you sure you have lost them? If they were that close to hatching they could have made it and just be delayed a bit. Info on power outages during Incubation. From- A Guide to Raising Chickens by Gail Damerow The more valuable your hatching eggs are, the more likely it is that the electricity will go out during incubation. If you have an uninterruptable power source (UPS) for your computer or other electronic equipment, consider disconnecting the usual equipment and using the UPS to power your incubator. If the outage comtinues beyond its capacity to keep your incubator running, or you don't have an UPS, open the incubator and let the eggs cool until the power goes back on. Trying to keep the eggs warm is likely to cause abnormal embryo development. Furthermore, if you close the vents or wrap the incubator with blankets in your attempt to keep eggs warm, a greater danger than temperature loss is oxygen deprivation. Developing embryos use up oxygen rather rapidly, and the oxygen level may soon fall below that necessary to keep them alive. As soon as the power goes back on, close the incubator and continue operating it as usual. The effect of the outage on your hatch will depend on how long the power was out and on how long the eggs had been incubated before the outage. A power failure of up to 12 hours may not significally affect the hatch (except to delay it somewhat), especially if the outage occurred during the early incubation, when cooled embryos naturally tend to go dormant. Embryos that are close to term generate enough heat to carry them through a short-term outage.
