Started lockdown early

[sixbabychicks14]

I don't know what I was thinking. I started my lockdown to early. The chicks are due this Sunday 4/25. I started last night around 10:00. Does anyone know if raising the humidity to early will kill my chicks or harm them? Thanks

 

[Blessing]

You should only start lockdown 3days before hatch date. Before that you should be turning them at least 3 times a day. All you can really do is wait. Sorry I couldn't be more help

 

[Ridgerunner]

First relax. You are OK.

If you started the eggs Sunday May 4, lockdown should have been Thursday May 22, and hatch should be Sunday May 25. An egg does not have a day’s worth of development two seconds or two hours after you put it in the incubator, it takes 24 hours for the egg to have a day’s worth of development. So make sure you are counting right. An easy way to check your self is that the eggs should hatch on the day of the week you set them. If you set them on a Sunday, they should hatch on a Sunday.

But that is all theoretical. Real life often gets in the way of theory. There are a lot of different things that can cause an egg to be a couple of days early or late; heredity, humidity, how and how long they are stored before you start them, and just basic differences in the eggs. A really important one is heat. If the average incubating temperature is a bit warm, they can be early. If it is cool, they can be late. My incubator was running about a degree warm the first time I used it. I had several eggs pipping when I went into lockdown. I still got a good hatch. Others have reported as much as four days late with an incubator too cool, but that is too much. Those hatches are usually not real good. I’ve even had a broody hen hatch two full days early. It can vary quite a bit.

You really don’t have to turn the eggs after about 14 days of development, but it’s convenient to stop turning them when we go into lockdown and raise the humidity, so that’s the standard.

Humidity is your real question. During the incubation period, the egg needs to lose enough moisture for the air cell to grow big enough that the chick has enough air to breathe when it internal pips and learns to breathe air instead of living in a liquid environment. But if it loses too much moisture then the air cell takes up too much room and the chick can’t move to hatch. Other bad things can happen.

The good news is that there is a fairly wide window that is acceptable. Each individual egg is different. Some have more porosity, thinner shells, or the whites are more watery. These eggs lose more moisture than others with less porosity, thicker shells, or thicker whites. There is no one humidity that is perfect for each and every egg in the incubator, but as long as you are reasonably close, most eggs will be OK.

The reason we normally go into lockdown three days before the eggs are due to hatch is that you want the humidity up when the eggs external pip. As I said above, that can easily be two full days early or maybe a bit more, even under a broody hen let alone in an imperfect incubator. If the humidity is too low when the egg external pips, it is possible that the membrane surrounding the chick can dry out and shrink around the chick, imprisoning it so it cannot move to hatch. That’s what is called shrink wrap. If the egg has not external pipped, it is not at all likely to shrink wrap. So if your eggs had not external pipped when you went into lockdown you didn’t harm them if you were late. It’s just not an issue.

There was a hatching calendar going around this site that would calculate lockdown and hatch for you, but it was wrong. It had lockdown and hatch a full day early, so many people went into lockdown a full day early. They still usually got pretty good hatches. Some people use a different counting method. Instead of looking for 24 hours of development being required to have a day’s worth of development, if the eggs are set in the morning they call that day 1, but if the eggs are set in the afternoon they wait until the next day to start counting. They are often much more than a half day early starting lockdown and it really doesn’t matter. Lockdown doesn’t have to be that precise as long as you do it before eggs start pipping. And even then, it seldom causes a problem.

Good luck with your hatch.