Poor Cuckoo Marans hatches

[keithallen1965]

I have just started hatching this fall im on my third and fourth batch. I have only hatched marans till this last two. I read on here somewhere that you have to start off with low hummidity 25-35% 102

for still air and 99.5 for forced air. My first hatch was with a LG still air I had heck with the temp up and down hummidity up and down. I have added a fan in the LG and have done well so far with Marans, Golden Cuckoo and BCM's better than 85% hatch rate. I have also just built a home made Incubator out of a wine cooler that hold 80-100 bottles of wine according to the guy I purchased it from and I have a test hatch in there now temp hovering around 100.3 and hummidity around 30%. I think and this is only my opinion you have to have the tenp and hummidity exactly right the last three days to have a sucessful hatch. I also have a turner in both incubators.

In my LG I have from Chef 7 BCM and 7Blue Coppers also from another person I forgot who I have 12 Wheatons Marans and 12 Blue Wheaton Ameraucanas and also a couple Black Australorps. So we will see what comes out of this one.

 

[Country Living Farm]

I can tell you after several hatches of Maran Eggs, (Cuckoo) it has to be the harder eggs. My other eggs and hatches no problem. I have hatched over 20 Cuckoo maran eggs and I have 1 chick right now. I just hatch 5 more out of 6. I died so i have 4. I learned from the past. I helped EVERYONE get out. I go tire of seeing fully developed chicks with yolk absorbed dead. I started to crack open the end to find the beak out of the inner memb., but never broke the shell. So, I now on day 20-21 start to crack open the end very small crack (whole) and let them work at getting out.

 

[hatchingbunnies]

Yes, my incubator has a fan in it. So, are you saying Marans need MORE air circulation than other breeds?

I have helped a couple hatch, 2 I waited too long and they died immediately--were almost gone when I finally decided to help them out. I will try starting them out at lower humidity. How long do you suggest for the 25-30%? When can I raise it to normal? Will that affect the other breeds? (RIR, Ameraucanas, etc)
Thanks for the help.

 

[rhoda_bruce]

I was interested in possibly getting Marans in the future. I had no idea of possibly having more trouble with the incubation process. I have, in the past, used hens for my duck eggs, because they did so much better than in the incubator. I would also think that I wouldn't be able to candle a Maran egg with good results, so I wouldn't know how they were doing until hatch day.
Still, I think that if its a difficult hatch I might use a hen. I believe they are just better at it than us.

 

[Germaine_11.20]

Quote:
I think you are right. And that is wise to put them up on blocks. I hadn't thought about that. And the egg carton would most likely stop air flow too.

I started to dry incubate and actually had a better hatch rate. I think the extra pigment doesn't let the air cell evaporate enough and some drown.

 

[hatchingbunnies]

I don't know what you mean by dry incubate. Can you explain?

 

[Germaine_11.20]

"DRY INCUBATION
BY Bill Worrell

As a student of poultry at age 14, I became fascinated with the breeding and hatching of eggs. Even when I only raised mixed up chickens and ducks I was always trying to find ways to incubate eggs. I started my poultry career with a few Araucanas and a few White Jersey Giant hens. My challenge became to find a way to get them to become broody. I never did. So I started trying to figure out how to make an incubator. I tried everything you can think of and nothing seemed to work.

A few months later an old friend of mine told me he had an old redwood incubator that hadn’t been used for 15 years or longer. I asked what he wanted for it. He replied that he’d like to have my car stereo. So I went out to the car and took it out and swapped it even. Man what a deal I thought. This thing was huge to me. It was 4 feet long, 2 feet wide and 3 feet tall. No egg turner and it had a water pan in it that had more holes in it than a sifter. I brought it home on my dads old pick-up truck and cleaned it up

. I plugged it in and decided it would probably need some work before I trusted it enough to leave it alone much less hatch in it. Well, to make a long story short, I did fix it up and got it working. Then placed it in my bedroom, much to my parents dismay. Man I was in the hatchery business. I hatched every egg I could find. Tried everything imaginable from ducks to geese, from chickens to guineas, from quail to wild turkeys. I had some success but mostly failure.

I had no understanding of how a bird develops in the egg, knew nothing about humidity, heck I didn’t even know about turning eggs in the Incubator. I just knew it was fun to see baby chicks come out of the shell. Still today I love to hatch. The next year later I added my first Hova-Bator from GQF. Reading the directions I found out for the first time about how to add water and the importance of turning eggs. For the first time I had a thermometer and I learned what a thermostat wafer was. Boy was I excited.

I started to incubate in conventional ways of adding water and turning the eggs, keeping the temperature at 99.5 degrees, and candling. I had good success but never hatched better than 60% and that was on rare occasions. Still I thought that was great. I had a few friends bring their eggs to me and ask me to hatch them for them. So I started a little enterprise at age 15 doing custom hatching for $1.00 per dozen. That first year with my new incubator and my old redwood incubator I incubated over 750 eggs. But all along I never realized how these hatcheries got 90-95% hatches. That was until a few years later. I met an older gentleman who asked me how I was hatching my eggs. I told him this story and explained that I could never get the hatch rate above 60%. He then replied, “Have you ever heard of Dry Incubation?”

I said I hadn’t. Then he explained what I am about to tell you. He said, “Bill, you need to stop adding water to your incubator.” I said to myself, yeah right. That don’t sound like any way of incubating I ever heard of. But I listened intently. This man changed my incubation practices forever. I took the info he gave me and experimented with it. And soon my hatch rate went to 70%, then 80%, then 90% and has even been 100% on several occasions.
I now use it exclusively. I now incubate fewer eggs each year and have more chicks that I did when I was incubating several hundred each year for myself, though most of what I hatch today is for other people. At one time I was hatching over 1,000 eggs per month and sometimes 1,000 per week for other people. So this is not theory. I still use it today and will never go back.

Here is how it works: First, you have to remember a few things. An egg must lose approximately 11% of its weight during the incubation cycle. That is, it has to have some evaporation of the contents of the egg itself in order for the chick to have room inside of the egg to develop and still have room to turn in the egg so it can spin around and hatch. Where most folks go wrong is they add water to the incubator and cause the humidity to increase to levels that hinder the evaporation process.

This causes the chick to grow too large inside the egg. The chick will pip the shell on day 21 and never go any farther. Have you ever wondered why this happens? I sure did. Second, the closer you can get to the proper temperature and keep it there the better. That is, keep your incubator in a room that the temperature doesn’t fluctuate drastically. My old redwood incubator will hold heat in a room where the temp doesn’t fluctuate more than 20 degrees. My Hova-Bators aren’t near that good.

They need to be in an area where the temp is close to the same within 10 degrees or so. I recommend that placement be in a room that doesn’t get direct sunlight in any windows. If you have central air or heat, you can leave the doors open and the vents open. This will make the whole house one constant temp. Lastly, start with good eggs. I never set odd shaped eggs or eggs that are too large or too small. They must have good shell quality and be from healthy birds. I recommend you feed a well balanced diet to your birds including Kelp, and D.E. as a de-wormer. I also recommend that you supply dried garlic to help with overall health.

I have information about overall health of chickens on another page in this site. Use it. It can only help. I also would advise you to gather eggs often in extreme weather and store them in an environment that is around 40-50% humidity and also the temp is below 70 degrees. And finally, set your eggs each week or 10 days maximum. I usually set mine every week on Sunday’s. This is what works for me. Now that you have your room set up, I would plug in the incubator and add no water. Allow the incubator to stabilize for a minimum of 48 hours to be sure it is at 99.5 for forced air(fan installed) or 101 for still air(no fan).

While it is stabilizing, get a room hygrometer(instrument that measures humidity) and place it in the room. Bring the humidity level in the room up to between 50%-75% preferably 50%. If you live in a humid environment, you may actually need to dehumidify your room. But nevertheless, if you keep the humidity at 50% or close to it, you will do great. By controlling the room humidity, you can be more precise with your moisture in the incubator. Since your incubator gets its air from the room, it will have the correct humidity. If the humidity in the room drops to 40% don’t get concerned. The eggs themselves will supply some of the humidity needed inside the incubator.
Higher humidity is worse that lower humidity as higher humidity hinders evaporation. By the way, if you are using a styrofoam incubator, make sure the red plugs are in the vent holes. Dry air allows you to also be more precise in the control of temperature as well. After 48 hours of stable temps in the incubator and stable humidity in the room, you are ready to place eggs in the incubator. I use turners as they allow me to incubate the eggs without having to open it up 2 or 3 times a day. Place your eggs in a turner with the big end up. Close the incubator and forget about it for 7 days.

On day 7, open the incubator and candle your eggs with a good candler. Throw away all the clear eggs as they will soon rot and could explode inside the incubator causing loss of the healthy eggs. Be very gently when handling these eggs, as the tiny embryos are very fragile at this stage in incubation. After the first candling, close the incubator and forget it for another 7 days. On day 14, open the incubator and candle the eggs again with your candler. Look for a real dark mass inside the egg and a small clear cell at the big end of the egg. This is the air cell. This is where the chick poke through first to get its first breath of air. If you were using the conventional means of incubation and had the humidity too high for these 14 days, your chick might encounter a good amount of water here. This could and often does drown your new chick before it even has a chance to pip the shell. If you see any eggs with large amounts of clear spots in them, compare them to the others and if they are very different, discard the eggs that have big clear patches in them

. These embryos may have died for various reasons while developing. After you candle them, put the lid back on the incubator and forget about it until day 18. On day 18, open the incubator and add a very small amount of water to one of the water channels in the bottom of the incubator. If you notice the humidity in the room is above 65% add only a tablespoon of water or two. If your room humidity is below 65% add about ½ of the channel full of water. Remove the eggs from the turner and lay them flat on their sides. Try to allow a little room between them. Then close the incubator and follow the next direction very closely.
This is posted under many topic from Bill Worrell:

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, OPEN THE INCUBATOR FOR 5 FULL DAYS. Hate to shout at you but this last 5 days will make or break your hatch. I get a little aggravated when people will go through all the previous steps and then it gets down to the moment, and they can’t resist opening the incubator. Every time you open the incubator, you release valuable moisture out of the incubator and allow dry air in. This is what causes chicks to stick to their shell membranes.

All you will have to do is lose a few chicks to this and you will change your habits. This means don’t open the incubator until day 23. On day 23 the chicks will be ready to take out of the incubator and placed in the brooder area. Make sure you have water ready and chick starter in low feeders ready for them in the brooder box. When you take a chick out of the incubator, dunk his beak in the water and make sure he gets a drink. Do this for all of them. Make sure they have a source of warmth,(ie a heat lamp, light bulb, brooder, etc).

I recommend you have 2 incubators. One for an incubator and one for a hatcher. This will help if you have several different hatch dates in one incubator. On day 18 place the eggs over into the hatcher incubator. Then add water and you’re good to go."


I think one of the keys to dry incubation is that it averages about 40%. I failed to pick that up the first couple of times reading this.

When I incubate, even without water and in my dry climate I average 25-30% I really was surprised to see the numbers. So I ONLY add water sparingly every day or two when it dips down to about 25%.

I have noticed that I do not have huge air cells like I had expected and even when I do the majority of chicks still hatch out. I don't have perfect hatches, but they are much better than when I kept the humidity up higher--even at a steady 40%. And with those hard, pigment covered Marans eggs, I think the lower humidity really helped.

I can't promise it will help for you. I hope it does. Also, I now start lockdown at no more than 65-70 %. I used to go higher until I found that the later hatching chicks were "sticking" which in my mind should have been impossibe with that high of humidity.

A kind poster explained the whys and hows of starting to high and I now start lower. The natural rise in humidity as the chicks hatch is enough.

Once, just once I miscalculated a hatch date and had chicks pip and zip in the egg turner. The humidity was only about 35%. That made me realize that they can get out of there at a lower humidity. They weren't Marans but it still got out!

 

[hatchingbunnies]

Thanks everyone for good info. This whole experience has made me think about fine tuning humidity--lower at first. My humidity is in the upper 50's-low 60's from day one. I just opened more vents to allow more circulation and bring the humidity down a little. Even though I've had pretty good hatches from all breeds but the Marans, I think tweaking the humidity will bring their rate up. We'll see soon!
One good thing about having a problem--it forces me to research and get more education than if things had just gone on as they normally had.

 

[onthespot]

woah! too high!!! get it around 40%

 

[Germaine_11.20]

Quote:
On the spot is right! Lower the humidity.