Incubation 101
I
feel like our four incubator runs this year have equated to a semester
of Incubation 101, which would make this last hatch the final
exam. Good thing I get to write a blog post full of pictures
instead of a term paper!
We hatched 14 very perky
chicks out of 24 eggs this time around. A 58% hatch
rate from mail
order eggs is above
average, so I'll give myself a B+ based on pure math.
Now that the normal
progression of pipping to unzipping to hatching is firmly ingrained
in my memory, I barely worried about the incubation process (although I
have to admit I woke up to peer into the incubator with the flashlight
when the chicks all started popping out of their shells in the middle
of the night.) I helped
one chick a bit
prematurely, then waited a long time to help another chick who might
have needed assistance (but who hatched on his own eventually), and yet
both of those troublesome chicks are now indistinguisable from their
brethren. I guess that's a B on grasping the gestalt of the hatch.
Now that I've settled on an
incubator that really does the job, I can start learning the
ideosyncracies of my equipment. For example, is it coincidental
that eggs in the center of the incubator tray are less likely to hatch
than those on the edges and tend to hatch later? I only kept data
on egg location for two hatches and both showed the same trend, but I
just don't have enough data points to know for sure. And if that
is indeed the case, what could I do about it to improve my hatch rate
--- move eggs around in the incubator every few days, perhaps?
And I wonder why the
majority of my eggs always seem to hatch on day 22 instead of the
stereotypical day 21. Should I be running the incubator a bit
hotter than 99.6 even though it's a forced air model? Or am I
just counting wrong --- is the day I turn on the heat considered day 0
instead of day 1?
I guess I'll learn these
more advanced tricks in Incubation 202, offered spring 2012. If
you want to brush up on your early incubation skills, you might be
interested in checking out my other chicken
incubation posts on
our chicken blog.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Baby chicks Like late summer snowflakes Each one so unique.