Category: Incubation

Lessons learned with broody hens

January 21, 2015 Chick brooder, Chicks, Incubation, Posts No Comments
Broody hen

It seems like every spring, one of our hens goes broody. Unfortunately, our success rate with those broody hens has been close to nill.

 


One year, we learned the hard way that the broody setup needs to be perfect. The nest box should be on the ground so chicks can pop back inside easily if they’re chilled, and it definitely shouldn’t be in a spot that can get wet during rains.

 


Another year, a Cuckoo Marans did an admirable job hatching eight chicks in an area she chose for herself in a little-used corner of the barn. But  we couldn’t catch the hen and her chicks to move them somewhere safer…and slowly but surely the chicks got picked off by a black rat snake.

 


Broody henDuring several other years, we’ve missed the boat, watching a hen start to go broody…and then watching her relinquish her mothering instincts when
we failed to set up a good nesting spot in time. So this year, I decided to be proactive. Even though it’s January and surely a terrible time to be incubating eggs, when one of our Australorp mixes began hopping the fence to hide her eggs in the garden, we set her up in an isolation coop complete with nest basket, food, and water.

 


So far, she seems to be settling in — not clucking angrily about being separated from her fellows, but instead spending time on the nest. I currently have five golf balls in the basket to simulate a clutch, but if our hen begins setting seriously, I’ll replace the golf balls with fertilized eggs. Perhaps this will be the year a broody hen comes through for us?

Maintaining high humidity in an incubator during hatch

October 25, 2012 Incubation 31 Comments

Wet, new chickAround day 19, when the first chicks could potentially start to pip, it’s time to raise the humidity in your incubator to 65% or more.  High humidity during hatch is essential to lubricate your chicks as they do the hard work of wiggling around, pecking their way out of their shells.  At the same time, you need to keep the vent at least a third of the way open because these hard-working chicks need more airflow to feed their struggles.  But the open vent tends to lower the incubator’s humidity, so that’s the solution?


Increasing humidity in an incubator with a wicking clothYou can buy evaporating card to stick in your incubator’s wells, but the cheaper method is just to use a piece of cloth. If you place part of the cloth or evaporating card in the well and let the rest sit along the bottom of the incubator, water will wick up into the extra surface area, resulting in more evaporation and higher humidity.


For an even bigger dose of humidity to counteract the vapor lost when you open the lid, heat up some water until it’s steaming but is still just cool enough to stick your hand in.  I poured some of this warm water into the wells every time I opened the lid of my Brinsea Octagon 20 incubator, which meant that the humidity rebounded within a minute of me opening and then reclosing the lid.


Opening the incubator lidMost websites will tell you
to be as hands-off as possible during the hatch, opening the lid only once every six to eight hours.  Now that I’ve had a bit of experience, though, I disagree.  I’ve learned the hard way that if a newly hatched chick rolls a neighbor egg so that its pipping hole is facing the floor, the chick still in its shell can expire before you’re allowed to open the lid again. Knowing some tricks to maintain high humidity while still being allowed to open the lid seems to be key to higher hatch rates.

Incubating chicken eggs


After several rounds of trial and error, I figured out the best way to incubate chicks. You can browse through old posts, or splurge on my ebook for the more refined solutions.

Humidity during chicken incubation

October 25, 2012 Eggs, Incubation 6 Comments

Humidity readingHumidity is one of the most important factors determining your hatch rate, but, contrary to popular belief, high humidity is more troublesome than low humidity during most of the incubation period. 

During hatch, of course, you want high humidity in the range of 65% or more so that the chicks won’t get stuck in the shell, but the goal is 40 to 50% for the first 19 days.

In order to hatch correctly, a chicken egg should lose 13% of its weight during incubation, and that weight is lost in the form of water evaporating out of the egg.  Over time, the air pocket in the egg will get larger as water evaporates out, creating a safe spot for your chick to breath in between around day 19 and the time the chick hatches.  If the humidity in your incubator is too high, then your chick won’t have the appropriate air pocket and will die soon before pipping.

There are a few different ways to get the right humidity in your incubator.  The simplest is to follow the instructions and fill a certain number of wells with water, but this is a very hit or miss approach — humidity in your incubator is determined by the humidity outside the incubator as well as by the amount of water in the wells.  We live in a very damp climate, and I suspect that following the instructions last time around is part of what resulted in such a low hatch rate.



Egg air sac size

The second method is to pencil the size of the air pocket on the outside of each egg at intervals while candling.  A chart like the one shown here can be used to see if the egg’s air pocket is growing at the right speed.  However, this technique requires a lot of judgement calls, and would be time consuming if you’re hatching more than a few eggs.

Another easy method to get the proper level of humidity is to buy a fancy incubator with a humidity readout.  Our new Brinsea Octagon 20 incubator will definitely help us in that regard, but there’s a big difference between 40 and 50% humidity and I’d like to know whether my eggs are losing weight at the proper rate.

Weigh chicken eggs

Which brings us to the final method of determining egg weight loss — weighing your eggs.  This is the method I’ve chosen, so I’ll go over the specifics of the calculations in a later post.

No matter which method you choose, you should be aware that it’s the average humidity over time that’s important to your eggs, not the humidity at any given moment.  So it’s okay to let the incubator wells completely dry out for a day if you need to in order to get the average humidity down lower.  In fact, some incubation experts practice dry incubation where they seldom or never fill the wells at the bottom of the incubator.  I plan to use a hybrid approach, adding water as needed to keep our
eggs’ weight loss on track.

 

Incubating chicken eggs


After several rounds of trial and error, I figured out the best way to incubate chicks.  You can read the blow by blow experimentation here, or splurge 99 cents on my ebook for the more refined solutions.