Trying to determine egg fertility

[DonyaQuick]

I recently incubated 8 eggs from several different hens and ended up with only 4 chicks. Three of the duds were fresh, one per day from the same hen and I still want to try to get some chicks from that hen in the near future. She never took as well to my rooster as the other hens so her eggs not developing was no huge surprise; unfortunately I think I collected the 3 from her after she had some sort of weird falling out with him, since I started seeing very obviously infertile eggs right after the ones I collected to put under a broody. My rooster is a gentle guy who won't try anything with an unreceptive hen, so I've just had to wait until they seemed to be back on good terms and then start checking fresh eggs again. I am having trouble "reading" her yolks though. I've seen other eggs show perfect bullseyes, so I do know what that looks like, but I've also seen variation in how well-formed the bullseye looks. From the hen in question, after a run of solid white dots (obviously infertile) I'm now seeing things more like the pic below, which are like a semi-circle with an off-center brighter white dot. If the pic is clear enough to tell anything, how should I be interpreting this pattern?

 

[DobieLover]

That does not look fertile.
Is her bum nice and clean?
Maybe you could try some nice mood music and give them a private room...

 

[DonyaQuick]

That does not look fertile.
Is her bum nice and clean?
Maybe you could try some nice mood music and give them a private room...

Bummer. Well, I will keep checking her eggs when I cook with them. She's consistently my cleanest, most well-groomed hen. Assuming it's not actually some issue with her eggs, it'll just be that she's still giving him the stink-eye when he's in the mood. He's been dancing for her, tidbitting, dancing while holding treats, and most recently bringing her little bug snacks to eat while she dustbathes. She quite likes all of that now, but I guess he's still got more work to do lol.

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

Wait, I'm left in the back trying to see what yaw'll see in the yokes. I don't see nuttin'!!!

 

[Hip Hillbilly Acres]

View attachment 3200923

Cool beans, way to educate a sista! Thank you.

ETA: You know I'm gonna be looking at every egg I crack from now until eternity, right!!!!

 

[DonyaQuick]

How old are these eggs that you can see that in ?

For mine at least I've seen the bullseye in fertile eggs that are 24h old to a couple weeks. I don't know what best practice for time range is though.

Hows it going?

Sadly all 4 eggs I set are duds I think. There's one week left according to the incubator and all are still glowy without obvious veins. They're brown enough it's hard to see detail so I'm not counting on seeing veins, but the glowy-ness just seems wrong at this point. That space should surely be filled. A couple looked like they had a darker dot forming and then stopped, which is basically the same thing that happened with the eggs that were under my other broody, so I don't think it's a problem with the incubator and makes me wonder if this hen might not be able to make viable chicks. I didn't crack her other eggs open when I did my first hatch; probably should have. I will give this current set the whole time in the incubator just in case I'm unusually terrible at candling, but after that I think I may need to crack them open to see what happened.

I had originally been thinking I might get a couple last-of-the-season chicks of whatever is local folks have to give her if this happened. I'm getting cold feet on that though because it looks like my first hatch gave me 1 cockerel and 3 pullets...which is kind of perfect if it really is that and I don't have other late bloomer cockerels in that batch. I kind of don't want to risk ending up with 2 nasty soup cockerels. To go pullet-only I think I'd have to get 6 pullets if I get them sexed from TSC or similar - and that's just too many if they even still have them in a week. Still, I do have worries that my chick-less broody is not going to take the transition well and may be exceedingly hard to snap out of this while she's still hearing chick noises from my current batch. I'm really not sure what to do.

Meanwhile I have total chaos with the rest of my flock...broody breaking will be impossible while the chicks are around so I haven't even tried. But with two hens out of the social loop, the other three and my rooster have now fallen out and there is all kinds of drama. I also apparently have not enough active birds digging to compost the substrate in the enclosure properly so this is all just going very well...*sigh*

EDIT: should mention that I'm making sure my chick-less broody is eating and drinking well. She's in good health. I'm not just letting her sit and risk starving herself.

 

[DonyaQuick]

True, but theres a chance they could be behind on development. Just give a couple more days just to be 100% sure. Whats the worst thing that can happen?

Doubling my current number of chickens instead of adding just a few and then my husband being mad that we have to hurry up the conversion of our old shed to a bigger coop. I thought I'd either have more incubator duds or be able to see in the others enough to pick and choose before the incubator ones were full of wiggly beans.

Well the real worst actually would be that I somehow screw this up yet again and end up with zero chicks for my hen which seems unlikely given the incubator ones. I just don't know if it's her that cause the 4 eggs to not develop, so I guess the others stay in the incubator for now. She can unfortunately tell the difference between real and fake eggs somehow so I'm inclined to leave her with the duds for now (gives me a chance to check them again to be sure anyway).

On day 5, nothing should be moving or floating around. What you should see is a dark spot on the side of the egg with a spider web veining blood vessels.

Thanks! I wish I'd asked that before since the movement would've told me I had duds in my first batch much earlier. I might not be able to see clear vessels well in the eggs my hen has even if they exist (2 are dark speckled and 2 are blueish) but I can definitely see the dark area floating around all over the place. If it isn't formed up more in place tonight then I guess I'm probably just looking at 5 developing ones in the incubator.

 

[BrandonsBirbs]

Cool beans, way to educate a sista! Thank you.

ETA: You know I'm gonna be looking at every egg I crack from now until eternity, right!!!!

I try everytime I do but I'm rubbish at it

 

[DonyaQuick]

Guess it will just take some time for fertility to happen with that hen.

I may be waiting longer than I'd hoped. I've started taking my chicks out with broody mama to dust bathe and forage by the coop as part of the long, gradual integration process ahead. The hen I want to hatch new eggs from has started going ork-ork-ork when she can see the chicks, and tonight I just found her sleeping in the nest box. I really hope seeing the chicks hasn't turned her broody right when I'm looking to get fertile eggs from her...

 

[DonyaQuick]

Uuuuggghhhhhh this is so frustrating. Pics from today, which is day 14. These are two pictures of the same egg rotated a quarter turn between pictures. It's one of the eggs I had hope for early on but it just isn't changing. You can see there is a non-round shape in there. It floats around when I change the egg's orientation and maintains that C-shape as it goes, but it has no visible movement outside of that. No obvious veins, no pulsing, etc. This is exactly what happened before with this same hen's eggs. The eggs that developed and hatched for me last month were getting pretty dark by this point, not half glowy.