Need help with turkey hatching problem!

[maureen9962]

My eggs pipped and then they began oozing this disgusting yellowish liquid. One poult never made it out. The other did but looks all gooey and sticky. I have never had a problem like this before. My humidity was between 60-70% on a digital hygrometer. Very disappointing.

 

[pawtraitart]

What was your humidity days 1-18? Have you checked the accuracy?

 

[maureen9962]

It ran at 40-50%. I am calibrating the digital hygrometer now. I calibrated a couple months ago and it was ok. I have never had this problem before and am perplexed. I had a poult on my last hatch that looked "fat" and laid on its back and never stood. Had to cull. Now the one that did hatch looks like it is doing the same thing.

 

[pawtraitart]

I find that my turkey eggs have really thick shells and don't lose enough moisture if I run my humidity higher than an average of 35% days 1-18. Next time, keep track of how large their air cells are and adjust humidity based on that. For me, lower is better. I run my humidity at 55-60% at lockdown knowing that it will go up a bit when they start to hatch.

 

[Gypsy07]

I have ne experience of hatching turkey eggs but from your description it sounds like your humidity was too high. For the next hatch you can do what Pawtraitart says, or you could weigh your eggs to gauge moisture loss. That's what I do with my chicken eggs and it works great...

 

[maureen9962]

I think I will buy a scale. Since my incubator is full again I guess I will have to wait until a set a new batch to start weighing or would it be beneficial now? Some have been set only a week. I of course have no starting weight from which to gauge the weight loss. Quite distressing...

 

[Gypsy07]

A small digital scale could still help, if you don't mind puzzling over a little arithmetic...

It's best for eggs to lose weight steadily, which would mean losing the same percentage each week. Do a bit of research and find out what percentage turkey eggs are supposed to lose over the whole incubation. And with a calculator and a few scribbles you can figure it out from there, cause even though you don't know what the starting weight of the eggs is, you can figure out at what rate they are losing moisture, and compare that to the recommended rate, then decide if you need to lower or raise your humidity depending on if they are losing weight too slow or too fast. Get some graph paper and draw some graphs. Pictures usually make things clearer for me anyway.

Like this... A chicken egg should lose between 12% and 15% of its weight during the 18 days of incubation before you go into lockdown. So an egg that started at 100g should end up weighing 85-88g. Put that on a graph, with the weight of the egg on the up/down axis and the days on the left/right axis, and you'll get a line that slopes down the way from left (day 1) to right (day 18). You can draw two lines for the two end weights to show the acceptable upper and lower rates of moisture loss. Now if you take any 7 day period between days 1-18, you can see the ideal start and end weights, and with a quick calculation you can see what the percentage weight loss should be for any 7 day period, and check it against your own eggs.

Not as accurate as having a start weight, but still worth trying out.