We appear to have pulled off our first staggered hatch...

ninjapoodles · Jan 21, 2009

...even with a several-hour power failure! Yep, I accidentally unplugged the incubator instead of the egg-turner yesterday. By the time I realized what I'd done, the temp was down to 74. I thought I'd surely killed them all, because the eggs were stone cold. You coulda knocked me over with a chicken-feather when eggs started hatching today, Day 19.

I set one batch of eggs 4 weeks ago, and added another batch to the same incubator 8 days later. 9 chicks hatched from the first group last week, and so far I have 4 hatched and three more pipped from the second group tonight (Day 19 for them).

I kept the humidity between 25-35% until Group #1's Day 18, then raised it to between 45-55% until the first hatch was complete. Candled at that point, and all of the Group #2 eggs were alive and kicking, so put them back in and backed the humidity back down until yesterday, which is also when I managed to unplug the incubator for several hours.

So I have no idea what to expect from this second batch, but at least I didn't kill them all! I wish I hadn't screwed up, because now if I don't get a good hatch rate, I won't be sure what went wrong. I was trying to see how successful I could be doing a staggered hatch.

OH--how I handled the actual first hatching, from suggestions from BYCers in an earlier thread: I took out the entire egg-turner rack, removed the eggs that were due to hatch and put them in a carton (with extras just on the wire). Hubby popped out half of the turner racks, and I replaced the turner, and put the cartons on the other side of the incubator. I put a cardboard divider down the middle to keep hatching chicks out of the turner, and I also popped them into a brooder as soon as they dried.