What am I looking at? (Candling with images)

[Flutterbee]

My hen Edna has been sitting on a nest of a dozen or so brown eggs for at least thirteen days (at most maybe sixteen, I was house-sitting for someone when she started) and I've really been struggling when it comes to candling. Today I decided to try again (much to Edna's dismay) and saw several different things. I saw large black dots in some of the eggs and even larger dark masses in others. What the heck am I looking at? Is she further along sitting wise than I thought she originally was? I didn't see too much movement but I didn't see anything like the red circle either. I don't know, attached are some drawings I did to show what I was seeing since it's so hard to take pictures of dark eggs. Black=masses Also she has been collecting eggs over the past week from my other hen who has been laying so could I be looking at a bunch of different hatching dates?

 

[chicmom]

I think image number 1 would be a "quitter" That's when the embryo died. Now, Image #2 looks like a developing embryo.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

The chick is developing. At eighteen days I only see the air sac and on occasion even that's been internally piped so all is dark.

Egg number 1 either stopped developing at some point or is an egg she recently grabbed that another hen laid. I finally marked the eggs under my last broody as her clutch kept growing in numbers. That way I could collect and eat any unmarked eggs on daily inspections.

 

[Flutterbee]

I think it could be a recent egg because I've noticed her stash of them has grown this past week. Is it okay not to really see movement when look at the eggs while candling? I mean, my shells are so dark, I can't even see blood vessels so that could be it. I just don't want the entire clutch to have died or something. It's so hard to know for sure how long she's been sitting. I know for certain its at least been thirteen days.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

You should mark the eggs with marker or pen so the clutch doesn't get out of hand. Too large and the eggs that will hatch have less a chance with all the late intros taking up space and pushing them out to the cooler edges.

She will only sit on the eggs for a day or two after the first chicks hatch so all the later added eggs are wasted. By marking them you can daily remove the new additions and still eat them.

With dark shell eggs it takes a strong led flashlight of 250 or even 500 lumen to see vein detail and with any egg candling in complete darkness works best. The detail is fun viewing but seeing the egg get darker and fill in with a chick is all that's really needed. That and size of egg sac if using an incubator but that's not even needed to note with a hen doing the work.

 

[Flutterbee]

What sort of marker is good to use? I don't want it to permeate the egg shell and possibly cause harm.

 

[enola]

Sharpie markers work really well.