Thunderstorms - Old Wives Tale??

[redonthehead]

I'm on Day 22 of my very first hatch. We've seen no signs of life so far... I've heard that thunderstorms can sometimes kill chicks that haven't hatched yet... is this true or just an old wives tale? We had thunderstorms both the evenings of day 19 and 20. By that point they were in lockdown, but up to that point they seemed to be developing and doing well from what we could tell by candling them.

I am using a homemade incubator, and I've been monitoring the temp, but have no way of monitoring the actual humidity level. We do have a dish of water in with the eggs. I'm nervous that they've all died! How long should I wait before checking things out? These are just what I'm calling "mutt" chickens... they are just from our eggs that we decided to set one day, not even knowing if they were fertilized... more of an experiment than anything, but now that we're this far into it I really want to see at least 1 hatch. LOL!

Thanks for any info you can give me!

 

[redonthehead]

Something else I was wondering. Most of our eggs when they went into lockdown seem to have shifted so the pointy end of the egg is down and they're sitting at an angle... is that normal when there is a properly developing chick in the egg?

 

[gogoalie]

If it goes to day 23, I'd float test them...

 

[redonthehead]

I'm totally new at this... how do you float test?

 

[gogoalie]

I noticed this is for quail, but should work for chickens too:

https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=383525

Good luck...

 

[dragonflydreamsfarm]

To expand this further does a barometric pressure drop cause issues? Does the membrane react to a pressure drop making it harder to pip?

We also had several severe thunderstorms about hatching time and lost the entire batch. However we also lost power to the incubator for 3 hours or so while in lockdown.