New Australian Hatching Mystery Egg at Home

[trapper john]

I know i can hardly wait!

 

[Sally Sunshine]

Oh how cool! I love the bator! great pics too! I am so excited for you!

 

[LONDON HENS]

Good Luck!!!

 

[Teloka]

Thank you all very much for the luck and the welcomes!

I am so excited, I can hardly wait, I'm very curious to see what is inside. But I'm also super nervous and anxious; because we only have the one little egg any problems or difficulties will be final and we only get one chance and need a 100% hatch rate! That seems hard to guarantee even for more experienced hatchers with high quality incubators, so I'm not sure what my chances are. But I'll do my best for whatever is inside!

 

[Teloka]

Wanted to update and say that I candled the egg again today just to check it's progress; it is now almost impossible to see shapes or anything through the egg as there is just a large dark mass at the base fading through to red veins and then the air cell. It is still moving and wriggling about and occasionally there are shapes that come out from the dark patches which I guess is the embryo inside adjusting and moving. The air cell seems to be a good size.

I don't know if it is safe to keep candling into late incubation (7 days to go now if it is a duck with 28 day incubation period), but I do like to see that there is movement in there still when I have! So anxious!

 

[Sally Sunshine]

 

[ChucktheChick]

Those are cool pics!!!!

 

[Toast n Jelly]

Crossing my fingers for you!

 

[trapper john]

Oh man im ready for another update????

 

[Teloka]

Thank you so much everybody for your support!

We entered lock down this morning. I candled the egg last night, and it looked very dark inside at the far end away from the air cell, with a tiny bit of red and veins between the dark and the air cell. I thought maybe I saw a shadow of a teeny little beak in the redness, but I am not certain. There was a very small amount of movement, but definitely not as much as I saw in the early stages. This seems to be normal though, from what I have read.

Today I increased the humidity in our incubator gradually up to 60%, and I have let the temperature drop down slightly to 37.0 (it spiked up two days ago quite high to 39'c, but it would not have been there for long as it would have risen to that from 37.5'c in the space of an hour. I cooled it back immediately to 37'5 when I saw it.) I have moved the lid to allow some better ventilation in the incubator, but I may increase it a bit more if the egg pips.

Is 60% the ideal humidity? I have to keep opening the incubator in order to replace the water in the dish I am using to provide the humidity because there is no other way, but I am not touching or moving the egg and I would have no problems getting the humidity up to 80 or 90% if it was needed because the incubator is so small and here in Australia our natural humidity and temperature is quite high at the moment.

Should I put the egg on a perfectly flat surface to let it roll? I read that baby birds can roll the eggs into the ideal hatching position, and mine may not have a lot of room to do so because our incubator is little and it is sitting on a tissue in a lid. I haven't touched it since last night because today was lock down, but is there a chance I could have put it down "the wrong way" or something?

I'm so super anxious now!! I do not know how to tell if it has pipped internally or anything like that, but there is no movement or noise from it thus far. I will be sure to update you if anything else occurs.
Aaahhhhhhh anxious anxious anxious little birdie here.