What’s wrong here?

[miken 89]

I don’t incubate a lot, but have been generally successful when I do. However something horrible has been going wrong with my latest. I started with 15 eggs. Candled them at 10 days and culled the ones that weren’t developing. Hatch started early this am. With 12 eggs still good (presumably). I’ve had two healthy chicks and four, have started breaking out and have crowned their eggs but died for an unknown reason. Humidity is 70-80%. Any ideas what went wrong? They are hybrid chicks. Half RIR (most likely) Gold Sex link or Black Astralathorp and half Plymouth Rock. I have a few Plymouth Rock hens. The two healthy ones are mixed.

 

[parvani]

Sometimes eggs just don't hatch.

You don't say where you are, what the temperatures have been like, whether the eggs might have gotten too cold in the coop before they were collected, how clean or dirty they were...

But it IS midwinter, and even if your hens are laying, your roosters might not be doing their job as enthusiastically.

It's mother nature, what can I say? There are a million things that can go wrong.

The chicks that pipped but didn't hatch -- I always have a few of those. I usually help them, because an incubator isn't a mother hen, so I figure if I'm going to start meddling with nature I might as well go all the way. So if a chick is having trouble hatching, it might be my fault because I didn't respect "lockdown".

I put the egg under the tap in my bathroom sink and run warm water over it. The water shouldn't run across the pip hole. It's warm, and it keeps the egg warm while I peel shell away.

Once there is enough shell peeled off to see where the chick's head is, I gently peel and or was the membrane off its head. At this point, if the chick is healthy, it will stretch its neck and maybe its wings.

The bottom half of the egg is trickier, because that's where the chick's umbilicus is attached. I try to gently spill the chick, umbilicus and all, onto a paper towel. It's good if only the chick falls out and the umbilicus has already detached on its own. But if the chick's navel bleeds, it might not make it. (I had one this last hatch that survived the hatch, only to die of infection a few days later. Next time I'm going to try some BluKote.)

After the chick is out of the egg, and all bits of membrane and shell are washed off (but leave umbilicus on if you can), wrap them gently in some clean paper towels and pat them dry. Then use a warm hair dryer to dry them off all the way before you put them back in the hatcher to dry. They don't need to be fluffy, just dryish, the way they'd be if they'd hatched out of their egg twenty minutes ago.

As always with chicks, use their reactions as a guide to water temperature and hair dryer temperature. If the temperature us too hot or too cold, the chick will squirm and peep. If it's just right, they'll like it!

I'm sorry you had such a trying hatch. I hope the next one is much better!