Ugh... pretty sure I’m only going to be 1 for 12 😭(pics)

[Chicalina]

Sorry to hear about your son. Mine broke his arm recently so I know how hellos that is as a parent to deal with.

I think on the upside, you've got 1 or 3 babies coming. Sometimes there is a genetic fault that causes early quitters. Don't beat yourself up. These things happen. Try again

 

[Chicalina]

Great update and adorable photos!!!

 

[Chicalina]

They all look dead to me.

3 hatched

 

[mtma]

Congratulations!! Yes I agree that it was the eggs, not you or the incubator. That incubator is famous for incredible hatch rates! So awesome your son could watch.

 

[Stephanie8806]

This does not look good.

My first question and the most important one when it comes to incubation is how many calibrated thermometers do you have in your incubator?

Temperature spikes and hot spots are deadly.

I am using the Harris Farms incubator. I ran it in a test for about 3 days straight about a month before adding any eggs with two additional thermo/hygros inside. It held steady on temp and humidity in the test.

As far as I could tell, the incubation period held those numbers stabile as well(apart from the 4or 5 times I opened it to candle). The temp never went higher than 100 or lower than 99. Seemed to stay right around 99.5. The humidity was higher than my test, sat right at about 40%(I had planned to run a 30-35% incubation). I hadn’t taken into account that the eggs might actually add humidity. But the breeder I got these eggs from recommended 40%, so I wasn’t too bothered by the bump.

 

[Stephanie8806]

It’s in my nature to try and over-control situations like this, so I tried to take a more relaxed tact. I only candled a few times to minimize handling, didn’t stress too much about weight or marking air cells, and just tried to monitor and leave them alone as best I could. It’s hard to soft through all the incubation instructions out there and not be hyper concerned with troubleshooting... maybe that was my mistake?

The last time I candled before last night(day 15/16) was around day 8. Everything looked to be going well, minus the 3 non-starters and two I couldn’t see into. It was around that time that my two year old broke his leg, so my attentions have been primarily elsewhere for the last week and a half-ish.

 

[Stephanie8806]

Congrats, I completely agree that those eggs did not look 100% to start with.

If you look at picture 1, 2 and 4 I believe they all have speckles on the shell and if yu look at the air cell the air cell has become much larger in those eggs than the eggs without speckles.

This indicated the eggs were too porous to hatch well. Then your expereince and the timing of when they quit indicted the rest had a rough transport. Posting can dislodge the air cell which has been a death sentence for my eggs every time, I have heard people manage to save a broken air cell but I am not sure that is really possible.
Regardless, even if the air cell was not dislodged I've still received eggs that must have given the embrio a good knock on the head and this has usually shown around day 9 for me too.

So you got 3 in the end? That's not bad considering I think it was the infertiles and bad transport that caused the others not to make it

Thanks for all those observations! This was my first time experiencing hatching of any type, and I felt like the candling was one of the hardest parts to interpret. I’ve read all the guides here, and I still wanted to be able to ask questions... I didn’t start a hatch thread or join a hatch-a-long here because I didn’t want to fall into a trap of checking too much.

And yes to the rough handling! I reached out to breeder and asked if from the pictures she could identify any place I may have went wrong, and she said the same thing of mailed eggs these days. So sad, I wish postage people took a little more pride in their jobs! She also thought that 3/12 was a good number, considering. Although I really wish I could have hatched one of the Amerucana(I’ve been struggling to be able to find them in stock for two years now ), I’m actually pretty happy with my results and everything I learned!

 

[Cecisflock]

They all look dead to me.

 

[Cecisflock]

3 hatched

oh awesome! Happy for you!

 

[Chicalina]

oh awesome! Happy for you!

Not me, but the OP updated the thread