Ok, thanks for the breeding advice.
ANd I hear you about survivability. Survivability and health. Maybe that means resiliency. My birds free range and that takes a little toughness ... maybe more than birds in pens. I think for this rare breed, that's how the parent stock is living.
So resiliency i's top of my list. Egg color is way lower on the list, but since I just hatched some yesterday, I wanted to know if I should mark the baby roos from brown eggs. So thanks.
It was a super weird hatch. We are having a heat wave and drought here in the NW as in much of the country. My incubator says the room should be between 70-80 degrees. So we had to run the AC. And even though the incubator was "ok" in maintaining internal humidity, I think the eggs felt the effect of the ambient dryness.
Almost all the eggs were shrink-wrapped. Four of 10 chicks were lost because they couldn't get air (I presume). Most of them required full assisted hatching. Here is a WONDERFUL article regarding that topic. Some say don't help a chick out of an egg because it's weak. I've not found this. And if the issue was incubator / operator error, I want to save that chick.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/articles/guide-to-assisted-hatching-for-all-poultry.72886/ if there's a similar article here on Permies, my apologies.
Not only were most of the chicks severely shrink-wrapped, half of them were UPSIDE DOWN! Thankfully that article addresses this. I have never seen this before in my limited experience of 5 incubations, but this high incidence makes me wonder if it is related to the dehydration in the eggs.
My take aways were that I need to fill the
water reservoir higher at night even if it means the humidity will rise above the recommended limit. Otherwise it was below the low limit by morning. The second takeaway was maybe I should find another place to incubate that won't require the AC / dehumidifier. It's a challenge in this house, because the rest of the house is built into the hillside and is too cool (below 70 recommended by the incubator instructions).
Ok. Just throwing that info out there in case the info helps someone else. Thanks again, Matt.
Best,
Caroline