Hello,
Wonder if someone could answer a couple of questions. I moved two broody hens with eggs to another pen a few days ago to keep them from being aggravated by the rest of my flock. I moved them at night as recommended. I went to check on them 2 hours after the move and one of them had gotten in the nest with the other leaving her eggs. They were cold to the touch. I replaced her and placed a partial barricade in front of the nest to keep them at home through the night. 1 hour later I went back to check on them and they were both out of the nest, however the second nest's eggs were not cold but had cooled down. I placed all eggs in the incubator and placed some eggs from the refrigerator in the nest to see if they would return the next morning. Both of them did return and tended the eggs for 48 hours so I replaced the original eggs under the hens and as of now all is well. My question is what temperature can eggs reach, and how long can the be unattended before the loose there viability?
Tim
There's probably a huge variability between breeds and even between individual embryos. That's why breeders worry so much about vigor in their flocks. The fragile birds are quite high maintenance and don't survive the realities of life, whereas the vigorous birds (embryos) are strong enough to get past those inevitable hardships. Many of the rare breeds have so few numbers that keepers are, by necessity, coddling along every bird, to the point that in some flocks they almost all have to be incubator hatched and brooded indoors because they have such poor vigor, and one dip in temperature during incubation or one good draft kills them all. With flocks selected for vigor, it takes extreme conditions, or really prolonged adversity, to create illness or death. So while someone may be able to provide some times or temperatures that have been documented, it may not apply to your eggs.
Since nothing obviously fatal happened, like the eggs froze, or were left out for 12 hours at 35 degrees on day 7 of incubation, it's probably worth trying to hatch them. You can always candle at the standard times to see if you've got life. If you're sure that the embryo(s) died after candling, you can throw the eggs away then to prevent them from exploding and soiling the nest.
I'm currently going through my first hatches, 5 eggs under a hen and 11 in the incubator. I keep wanting to know all the exact information, all the available data and numbers so I can manage these hatches properly. Then I realize that nature is quite resilient, and that the species would have died out a long time ago if perfection was required for reproduction. Perfection might increase your numbers, but the vigorous ones find a way to overcome minor insults. I sometimes feel like an intellectual ping pong ball, first reading all the "research information," then reading about someone buying refrigerated fertile eggs from the local Whole Foods market, putting them in a homemade "incubator" consisting of just an electric skillet with a towel inside, and getting some to hatch. Apparently doing everything wrong doesn't guarantee total failure, and doing everything right doesn't guarantee any success. But then, we need hope and variety to keep life interesting, and to force us to keep an open mind.
Good luck with your eggs. Please post again to let us know how everything turned out.
