Urgent - to take egg or not to take egg?

[kstaven]

Parent hatched and artificial incubation are apples and oranges. We maintain a baseline artificially when incubating, while parent hatched eggs see much wider swings even with the best pairs.

 

[adrian]

Unfortunately I don't yet have a gram scale that weighs in 0.1 or 0.01 gram increments due to the fact that they seem to be impossible to find around here. If you know of a supplier I would be more than happy to order one online... In any case they both lost about 1 gram of weight through incubation which, from my calculations, although it could never be too accurate because of the gram scale, was at least 10% and given from the size of the air cell, it was more than that. However I could not say whether it was too much.

In any case, it would be a lot easier for me to maintain ideal conditions in my incubator but obviously I wanted to see how it would be with the parents. I've hatched parrots before, in the same house, in similar nest boxes, similar substrate, and never had this strange erratic, early pipping.

 

[kstaven]

Once again I go back to the parents in this. Not keeping eggs humid enough and likely not keeping heat and moisture transfer from breast to egg in range. Remember that when a parrot parent allows the egg to cool during normal off nest activity there is more air transfer through the shell which can cause stiffening of the membrane and stiffening of the outer wall of the blood vessels, which can complicate the process of them receeding prehatch. If the vessels do not receed properly the chick will not turn. Some parents get it down eventually and others never do.

You also often find that day one hand raised babies (especially syringe fed ones, rather than spoon, or pipette) do not feed their young properly.


Grumbach offered a good accurate scale at one point. That is where mine came from.

 

[adrian]

Thank you for the information and the advice. I believe they get off the nest regularly, but the blood vessels did recede properly in the first egg. The blood vessels are not receding in the second egg because it is pipping too soon: it is literally not ready to externally pip, no less to actually cut out. I'm not sure why that would happen. Like I said, as soon as the draw down of the air cell occurred, both chicks pipped the shell, before they even began to breathe. I have no experience with this so I am completely befuddled but I imagine it is due to the parents. Obviously they were able to get them this far but they are relatively new to this all. They were parent-raised, however, and are not tame, so perhaps they will learn in time.