AUSTRALIAN POULTRY FORUM™

after about 30 hours you may as well help them, other wise they will probably die anyway

I've had brown leghorns take 48 hours to break out, and they've been fine. If you try and get them out too early, the membrane can bleed, or the yolk might not be absorbed yet. Remember that the chick will move for a little while, then rest for a long while, then move again & so on. If he's resting it's not because he needs help.

The best help to them is to keep them humid. Give a little warm spray if you get worried about humidity. Be careful not to drown them if they've pipped).

When I have ended up helping, I have sometimes saved a chick, but it usually has health problems. If a humidity problem is the reason it's not hatching, then helping can be fine.

However, if your humidity is good, and it's not hatching because there's something not right with it, then you end up saving something that you need to put down later. I leave them alone now and let nature take its course. I just keep it nice and humid so that the good ones can make it out.

Hi Charles

Some of my pekin eggs took all day and half the night to hatch out fully

i'm learning patience is a verture with eggs pipping

hope it eases your mind a little, the first hatch can be very nerve racking and prolly most others after that..

Well, the first one is out and my input was very minimal.

I was at work until after midnight, then when I came home it had finally been rotating and creating a way out.

Between the webcam and CamStudio, I was taping the hatch. 1 frame per 3 seconds recording, playback 20fps. ie. 1 second of video equaled 1 minute. 1 minute equaled 1 hour.

Seems he/she had only been at it for about half an hour.

Well, I basically allowed it to hatch itself. All I did was reach in and move it (egg and all) away from the basket wall so it had room to maneuver and then when it was totally out, I took the shell out of the incubator.

Then I went away for aboout 30 minutes. When I came back, it had disappeared off my screen (which is how I'd watched most of the hatch). The video tells the story of where it went.

It's uploading to YouTube now and hopefully it will work. It's my first YouTube video upload.

You can see a photo of it at http://www.greenaus.com/chooks/firsthatch.jpg


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Gday greenaus, i'm so happy for you that your home made incubator is working-Well Done!

How many more have you got due to hatch?....and how much did your incubator end up costing all up?

Started with 15 eggs but was down to just 12 at day 20.

Four have hatched successfully from midnight through to 9am this morning. The fourth looks a bit sickly, plus it was really sticky at birth. I had the eggs sitting in a bed of rice and it has rice stuck to it.

One that had poked it's beak out at about 4am got it's beak stuck and it died. ...well, that's how it looked to me. It only had a couple of mm of beak protruding from the shell.

I had moved this egg to the other basket during turning of the Day 6 eggs to make more room, so it may have been my fault. Humidity and temp were down for up to ten minutes after, I guess.

As of now, there doesn't seem to be any further action. They're a mixture of bantam and large eggs, today is day 21 and I had expected a late hatch as my belief was that average temp was a little low.

So, with a whole lot of luck, a couple of the large eggs may hatch.

7



1 Chrisco styrofoam box...........$0
2 25w light bulbs......................$2
1 indoor outdoor thermometer..$22 delivered
1 micro-comp temp controller...$68
2 small storage baskets............$6
wire and wood.........................$2
TLC........................................$0

Total......................................$100

It ran 2 x 25w bulbs for 5 minutes out of every 20 for about 21 days so far. So ~126 hours x 50w = 6.3kw @ ~15c/kw = 94.5c

So far for around $101 I have four chickens (which may yet decide to die) but there may be more on the way.

I've built them a "temporary" brooder. I'll start a new topic for that.

Can't wait to see the vid make sure you post a link to it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TxqJIacWPI

Thats heaps good