Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[BDutch]

I've been adding some dried split peas to their feed and while it isn't the first item they go for, they are, or at least some of them are eating the peas.

Want a good recipe for the split peas? Here’s a traditional recipe from the Netherlands:
https://www.veganamsterdam.org/recipe-dutch-split-pea-soup/

Red soup tax chicken through the window:

 

[Shadrach]

 

[fuzzi]

Turning eggs like that is important for the broody but not when they are stored before they go under the broody or into an incubator. This has been researched and they got the best results storing with the pointy side up without any turning.
It’s mentioned in the same lecture as I mentioned in my previous post.

Oh dear. I'm hoping for a hen to go broody again. I read here on BYC to store eggs for hatching at room temperature, turning once a day until they're put in the incubator.

When I gather eggs I write the date on the egg with pencil and place it in an egg carton on the kitchen table. Every day I add that day's eggs, remove and refrigerate/eat eggs that have reached the 7 day mark, and turn everything else.

Am I following wrong advice?

 

[fuzzi]

Moments earlier he'd scared son Tintern off Quenell
View attachment 3763733

What a shot!

 

[Perris]

Oh dear. I'm hoping for a hen to go broody again. I read here on BYC to store eggs for hatching at room temperature, turning once a day until they're put in the incubator.

When I gather eggs I write the date on the egg with pencil and place it in an egg carton on the kitchen table. Every day I add that day's eggs, remove and refrigerate/eat eggs that have reached the 7 day mark, and turn everything else.

View attachment 3765363
Am I following wrong advice?

I have been doing a lot of reading on this recently. I'll collect my thoughts and get back to you on current thinking as far as I understand it (up to 2024 - it is a really current topic of work!)

 

[Perris]

What a shot!

thanks; but I really can't claim any credit, as I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and focussed on Tintern as a birth-week boy (25 of them that day), with shutter speed prioritized because they all move so damn fast, when he jumped on Quenell and Fforest then charged in from off stage left, and a moment later the camera shutter flipped I love the way Tintern's looking over his shoulder as well as the heart shape his wings make. I also think I see Fforest's rear feathers facing backwards so to speak as he does an emergency stop (he didn't crash into Quenell at all).

 

[Perris]

I made a vegan dish the other day for a friend and that was really good.

do try a homity pie - especially when you've got your home grown onions, garlic and potatoes - it's really tasty, and you can get readymade vegan pasty too now (though I've no idea what that tastes like)

If not, I'm in for a lot of soup and stew making.

pea and ham, aka London Particular, is very, very good.
https://www.deliaonline.com/recipes...sh/the-london-particular-green-split-pea-soup

 

[BDutch]

Oh dear. I'm hoping for a hen to go broody again. I read here on BYC to store eggs for hatching at room temperature, turning once a day until they're put in the incubator.

When I gather eggs I write the date on the egg with pencil and place it in an egg carton on the kitchen table. Every day I add that day's eggs, remove and refrigerate/eat eggs that have reached the 7 day mark, and turn everything else.

View attachment 3765363
Am I following wrong advice?

Not the wrong advice. Only not optimised according to the professional who held the lecture.

Professionals say: Pointy side up, no turning. If you turn from pointy side up to bol turning method is okay too, you use
Best temp and humidity is like in a cellar: Not too dry and cooler than room temp. Definitely not above 25 C.
If you don’t have a cellar and it’s warm, you better store them in a fridge.
The freshest eggs are best. Fertility diminishes over time. Avoid to use eggs older than 2 weeks if possible.

So if you only store them a week its probably fine how you store them.

Spoiler: The advice on storing eggs from the lecture

Storage temperature

Typically, an embryo in an egg begins to develop at a temperature between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius. If the storage temperature exceeds 25 degrees, there is a chance that the development will begin. So in the summer you have to take this into account! You will then have to cool the eggs (for example put them in the basement) or have them incubated. A few days of summer heat is enough to make a laying upset.

If you only have to store the eggs for a few days, you can keep a temperature of 18 degrees Celsius; if eggs are to be stored for a longer period of time, Ivo advises to keep the eggs at about 12 degrees Celsius (10-15 degrees). Warming up eggs should be done slowly, as eggs do not tolerate a temperature shock. This applies to both cooling and warming up.

Relative humidity

Short but powerful: as high as possible. But the eggs should not come into contact with water. A basement is ideal: it is both moist and cool. You can also turn an egg into cling film. It then loses as little moisture as possible. Moisture loss reduces the quality of the hatching egg.

Turning and moving the eggs

You can store the eggs in three ways: horizontally, with the tip down and with the tip up.

Horizontal:

Then turn once a day; with a storage time of two to three days you do not have to turn the eggs. That turning must be done back and forth: so from left to right and then from right to left. This has to do with the position of the hail cords in the egg. These hold the egg yolk in place and have a twisted shape. If you rotate in one direction each time, you have the chance to turn the spiral hail cords out of the spiral shape, so that they no longer function properly.

Point down:

Then tilt partially to the left or to the right (angle of 90 degrees) each time.

Point up:

Scientific research has shown that this is the best method. Turning is then not necessary. The result of eggs turned out to be the highest when stored with the tip up.

Source in Dutch : https://kanariewereld.nl/de-kweek/eieren-behandelen/

Writing the date with a pencil is a very good thing too. I make a second mark on the other side too. If you lay the eggs under the broody it helps to distinguish them from any new eggs you want to take out.

 

[Perris]

Oh dear. I'm hoping for a hen to go broody again. I read here on BYC to store eggs for hatching at room temperature, turning once a day until they're put in the incubator.

When I gather eggs I write the date on the egg with pencil and place it in an egg carton on the kitchen table. Every day I add that day's eggs, remove and refrigerate/eat eggs that have reached the 7 day mark, and turn everything else.

View attachment 3765363
Am I following wrong advice?

Seems like a workable method Fuzzi, though the turning seems redundant from what I've read too. Here's an overview of current thinking on the topic:

Incubation

First note that research on this is almost entirely focussed on how to improve hatchability and quality of chicks incubated in huge numbers in artificial incubators; when hens and natural incubation get a mention, it is almost always merely as a base reference point. Ironically, one of the latest techniques being tried (SPIDES) sort of mimics the behaviour of a hen building a clutch, so maybe one day soon I’ll have an answer to the question I’m really interested in (which is the effect of repeated short term heating and cooling on the developing embryo as the broody or other hens sit on it to build the clutch); but I’ll just park that for now and focus on the key takeaways for a backyard wannabe broody assistant.

Best results have been got with eggs stored between 3 and 7 days; this graph (from Brake et.al. Egg Handling and Storage 1997 Poultry Science 76:144–151) illustrates it.

The albumen changes over time (notably, its ph), and its suitability for the embryo drops off more or less sharply after the first week. But very fresh isn’t ideal either (that chimes with my emergency Venka hatch where the only one that didn’t make it was the freshest one).

The concept of ‘physiological zero’ has been superseded by the notion of ‘embryonic diapause’ because there is development going on in the blastoderm (and some cells are dying) while in storage. There is at least one critical point in this early development where, if conditions are adverse, the mass of identical/ nearly identical cells that the blastoderm is, cannot differentiate into the wide variety of cell types needed to make all the different bits of the body of the chick (called pluripotency), and that leads to early embryonic mortality (usually mistaken for infertility).

Eggs that are stored longer may develop more slowly (than those stored for shorter times) when they resume development and not catch up, which could lead to them being left behind when the broody leaves the nest (because she has to look after the chicks that hatched earlier). Or they may not This quote is specially for Shad : “the biological age of an embryo from a 14-d stored egg lags behind that of an embryo from a 4-d stored egg (Fasenko and Robinson, 1998). This observation was made even though the chronological ages of the embryos were the same. In examining embryonic development every 3 hr for the first 12 h of incubation, it was determined that the development of the embryos from 14-d stored eggs began to lag behind as early as 6 hr into incubation. Further to this, it was determined that not all embryos responded the same way to long-term storage. Some embryos of long-term stored eggs, even after exposure to normal incubation temperatures for 12 h, had not initiated any development. Other embryos advanced in development, but not at the same rate as embryos from short-term stored eggs. Perhaps the most interesting result obtained was that there were some embryos from long-term stored eggs whose development was equal to that of the short-term stored eggs” Fasenko, Egg Storage and the Embryo 2007 Poultry Science 86:1020–1024.

Turning: the focus in the research papers on storage stage is almost entirely focussed on temperature and time. Even relative humidity barely registers; the tolerances there are huge. As a personal aside, I never turn eggs in storage and (as I have learned from this reading) my hatch rate is sometimes better than the industry standard. The Brazilian paper observations on turning, which are very useful and relevant to the incubation stage, I already gave in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat here.

Other relevant tidbits:

Eggs laid by older hens develop faster than eggs laid by younger hens.

If you manipulate the temperature going in or out of storage, do it slowly. Abrupt temperature changes can be damaging.

A lot of detail remains unknown, e.g. exactly how many embryonic cells need to survive storage in order to successfully resume development, and this, from one of the leaders in the field, from 2021: “Our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the relationship between storage temperature and development stage within the DW [diapause window] is rather limited”.

Good luck with the hatch when it happens!

 

[fuzzi]

Not the wrong advice. Only not optimised according to the professional who held the lecture.

Professionals say: Pointy side up, no turning. If you turn from pointy side up to bol turning method is okay too, you use
Best temp and humidity is like in a cellar: Not too dry and cooler than room temp. Definitely not above 25 C.
If you don’t have a cellar and it’s warm, you better store them in a fridge.
The freshest eggs are best. Fertility diminishes over time. Avoid to use eggs older than 2 weeks if possible.

So if you only store them a week its probably fine how you store them.

Spoiler: The advice on storing eggs from the lecture

Storage temperature

Typically, an embryo in an egg begins to develop at a temperature between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius. If the storage temperature exceeds 25 degrees, there is a chance that the development will begin. So in the summer you have to take this into account! You will then have to cool the eggs (for example put them in the basement) or have them incubated. A few days of summer heat is enough to make a laying upset.

If you only have to store the eggs for a few days, you can keep a temperature of 18 degrees Celsius; if eggs are to be stored for a longer period of time, Ivo advises to keep the eggs at about 12 degrees Celsius (10-15 degrees). Warming up eggs should be done slowly, as eggs do not tolerate a temperature shock. This applies to both cooling and warming up.

Relative humidity

Short but powerful: as high as possible. But the eggs should not come into contact with water. A basement is ideal: it is both moist and cool. You can also turn an egg into cling film. It then loses as little moisture as possible. Moisture loss reduces the quality of the hatching egg.

Turning and moving the eggs

You can store the eggs in three ways: horizontally, with the tip down and with the tip up.

Horizontal:

Then turn once a day; with a storage time of two to three days you do not have to turn the eggs. That turning must be done back and forth: so from left to right and then from right to left. This has to do with the position of the hail cords in the egg. These hold the egg yolk in place and have a twisted shape. If you rotate in one direction each time, you have the chance to turn the spiral hail cords out of the spiral shape, so that they no longer function properly.

Point down:

Then tilt partially to the left or to the right (angle of 90 degrees) each time.

Point up:

Scientific research has shown that this is the best method. Turning is then not necessary. The result of eggs turned out to be the highest when stored with the tip up.

Source in Dutch : https://kanariewereld.nl/de-kweek/eieren-behandelen/

Writing the date with a pencil is a very good thing too. I make a second mark on the other side too. If you lay the eggs under the broody it helps to distinguish them from any new eggs you want to take out.

Thank you. The temperature in the kitchen is below 78°F/25°C so that's good. I'm trying to identify the Sussex eggs so I can hatch some purebred replacement pullets, as the rooster (for now, he's on borrowed time) is also bantam Speckled Sussex. I was using food coloring on the Sussex hens' vents with limited success, Blu-kote is my next option.

It's been about six weeks since I had a broody hen, I want to have eggs ready to go when one does get the itch.