I had a broody Rhodebar sitting on 9 eggs. Saturday I noticed that 1 had hatched. I assumed several more would follow. Today she's on the ground with 1 chick, 8 eggs still in the nest. I checked the remaining eggs and 1 had been cracked(STEPPED ON) and was leaking, so I discarded it. I realized that she was done, so I removed the rest. I threw the unhatched eggs into the woods and three of them exploded on impact, thank heaven they didn't explode in the nest or on me.
I am pretty disappointed in my young hens hatch rate. This just goes to show that even mother nature can have a bad hatch sometimes.
And this year is apparently bad for everything and everyone!
When I got the call from a breeder way back in January about goose eggs I had purchased the year prior (after which her geese stopped laying) she kept me updated, but mostly with bad news. The geese were ready to start laying, but it was still freezing over so most of their eggs froze and then cracked from the ice. Then another breeder I was in touch with for "colored" sebastopol geese had such a bad hatch, she didn't sell a single egg OR gosling this year. My own flock had issues with two 8-month-old silkies who still hadn't started to lay, and four other bantams over 6 months old, who weren't laying. My EE's actually just flat out quit during the winter this year - which they didn't do last year. And prior to losing my leghorns, they went almost a week without laying as well. LEGHORNS!
Now that everything is laying, my hatch rates are still up there, but not for the broody hens. I was also hoping for some peacock eggs this year that I couldn't get because that guy's birds weren't laying normally. And McMurray Hatchery had to delay my bantam order originally because their own hens weren't producing well, and their hatch rates were REALLY, REALLY low. Something about the weather this year has killed off a lot of reproductive attempts in all sorts of fowl!
And that's not including the sick chicks that I began to get after bringing home some babies from
Tractor Supply. And the more and more I think about it, the more I'm thinking it was the
Tractor Supply chicks that brought me trouble, and not the McMurray chicks. Especially after finding out
Tractor Supply's source of chicks is the cause of yet ANOTHER serious salmonella outbreak, and a very LARGE percentage of people who got chicks from them, have lost them.
