Low fertility

[yyz0yyz0]

Ok, so we put 12 eggs under a broody hen and all we got was one chick.


We have 3 GLW, 3 SLW hens and our Roo is a Blue laced Red Wyandotte. The hens are 2yrs old and the roo is a year old.

When I removed the unhatched eggs and broke them in the compost pile most of them just looked like I had taken them out of the fridge and broke them, a few were green and rotten. So it appears to me to be a fertility issue or the Roo is just not mounting them all or doing it enough.

Is there anything I can do to increase our chances next time we set eggs under a broody? We mostly see him mounting the silver hens, very little activity with the gold ones. So that could be part of our problem.

Is there anything environmental that we can change that will help with this? It's frustrating to set 12 eggs and only get one, but I guess it's better than getting none.

 

[GitaBooks]

Roosters, especially the heavier breeds, can choose favorites and ignore the others. There are a few other reasons for infertility:
Inbreeding or poor genetics of the breeder flock
Improper nutrition
The wrong time of year
An injury to the rooster

Could it be that the hen couldn't cover all the eggs?

By the way, your chick is very cute.

 

[yyz0yyz0]

Roosters, especially the heavier breeds, can choose favorites and ignore the others. There are a few other reasons for infertility:
Inbreeding or poor genetics of the breeder flock
Improper nutrition
The wrong time of year
An injury to the rooster

Could it be that the hen couldn't cover all the eggs?

By the way, your chick is very cute.

thx, we think its adorable also. We pray that it's a hen, if it's not then our current roo might be destined for the stew pot.

Our rooster is definitely heavy, he's probably almost twice the size of the hens especially the slivers and they seem to be his Fav's. I don't know if it's his size or something else but he does seem to have trouble mounting the hens. He only seems to mount them if he can take them by surprize, we'll be watching chicken TV and see him come up behind a hen and lift his leg to mount and if she turns and sees him he just puts his foot down and wanders away as if he wasn't doing anything. The last roo we had was a barnyard mutt and he had no trouble with the deed, but he went psycho and was sent to freezer camp.