Adventures in incubation

Last week a pack of dogs killed my flock of layers, presenting an opportunity to start anew. It's much too late to in the season to order live chicks as nearly all varieties at hatcheries are sold out, so I bought an incubator online which arrived yesterday and I set 55 eggs from my former flock. I've never hatched my own eggs before and my wife and I are excited about this. The incubator is mostly sealed except for a small hole to add water for maintaining humidity, and it has a little fan circulating the warm air within.

So I got to thinking about stale air or gas exchange and it seems to me like a good idea to periodically, perhaps once a day, to briefly remove the lid to get exchange the air inside the incubator. What do y'all do?

Very sorry to hear about your chickens.  I would be sick.

I incubated and hatched my first chick last fall.  It was a lot of fun and pretty interesting.  As far as the air exchange, I wouldn't be too concerned.  If you candle them at 7 and 14 days, I think that will be plenty.  Enough air should be exchanged via the fan anyway, but during candling, it will be pretty much a full exchange I would think.  The only thing I would add, and you probably know already, is be sure you don't take any chicks out to soon.  I would leave them 24 hours after hatching at absolute minimum.  48 would be better.  I had only one chick die of the ones I hatched and I'm 90% certain it was because it wasn't left in the incubator long enough.

I'm so sorry for your loss! I've lost chickens to dogs before (although not my entire flock), and I know how hard that is! Just for the record, there are a few hatcheries I know of that still have chicks, and your local Bomgaars or TSC should also have chicks. Here's a link to two of my favorite hatcheries that still have chicks: Hoovers and Bresse Farms. You may also look into pullets, since they're closer to laying.
Great decision to incubate though! In my experience, home hatched chicks grow out faster, mature better, and are more adapted to the environment. Plus, you can work on humanizing them way earlier on, and enjoy the experience of watching them hatch! I wouldn't worry about the air circulation at the moment, the fan should take care of it. Making sure you candle and pull out bad eggs is the most important thing at the moment. I've run into some issues with bad air mid-hatch before, but it was at the end and because I hadn't taken all the eggshells out. As a general rule, a good incubator should handle all of that on it's own.
Even during hatching, when the air can get stale, you shouldn't do air exchanges. If you aren't careful when you open it, chicks that aren't all the way out yet can "zip" and die. Just let the incubator do it's job.

Oh, James! I'm so sorry. We lost half our first flock to a (former) neighbors dogs, just a couple hours after John left them out to forage for the day, and laughing at their antics, told me, "This is my favorite part of the day!" We were crushed. I can't imagine losing them all. Hugs...

James, do you understand what "lock-down" means? A certain number of days before hatch, you have to remove the turner device and let the eggs sit without moving. I usually incubate duck eggs, so I'm not going to quote a number of days - the instructions you got with the unit should tell you, or the web.
My friend miscalculated (as she's prone to do because of a health problem) and lost a couple of chicks because they got squished by the turning mechanism when they were out of the shell, but too weak to realize the danger.

If you find yourself in a position to get a few chickens of a "self-replicating" breed, momma raised chickens have some extra benefits when it comes to avoiding trouble. The friend mentioned above has banties that regularly go broody. Miss Magic is sitting on 6 regular chicken eggs and Miss Zazu is sitting on 4. They're both due this Friday and I'm already feeling the excitement and counting down the next 3 days.

There are soooo.... many critters out there wanting to eat our domestic birds! Do you know if it was a wild pack or domestic dogs that were bored and decided to give chicken killing a try? I've thankfully not had dog problems, but don't get me started on Ravens and Eagles... it's been a *very* bad few weeks and no end in sight.

I am so very sorry for your immense loss and so very glad you made the decision to try to hatch those eggs. There's something poetic about the last eggs being used to raise a flock.
Like almost every other chicken keeper, I've lost birds to dogs and have lost a flock before. It was heartrending and I sorrow for you. As Pearl might say, my heart sorrows. And it does.

I wouldn't open the incubator. I've had chicks hatched by hens before - not many until this year, it seems, but a few and it still strikes me as being a miracle. I have an incubator that I bought this spring, and will probably load up during the summer. Reading the directions for that, they seemed to emphasize the point of Don't Open the Incubator Unnecessarily. What constitutes "unnecessarily" would be up to you, I guess.

An incubator with turner and fan and exterior openings to allow for water indicates that they really don't want you to open it unless you need to. They took care of all the reasons you might open it otherwise. With incubation being a miracle, and the manufacturers going out of their way to make sure you don't have a reason to open the incubator, ... I won't be opening mine aside from checks on Day 7 and Day 15 or so. I'll read my books again and see what the experts say.

I don't think it's airtight, which means there's going to be some airflow, no matter what.

Jay Angler wrote:James, do you understand what "lock-down" means? A certain number of days before hatch, you have to remove the turner device and let the eggs sit without moving. I usually incubate duck eggs, so I'm not going to quote a number of days - the instructions you got with the unit should tell you, or the web.  

Chicken eggs take 21 days on average.  They need to be turned for the first 18 days and the last three they shouldn't be turned.  My incubator stops turning at the 18 day point, but I do as Jay said and take out the turning mechanism anyway.  It gives the babies a little more room and if the incubator were to get reset somehow, the eggs still won't be turned.

Thanks everyone for the replies. So I did lift the lid on the incubator, and I'm glad I did. Upon lifting the lid was the unpleasant and malodorous aroma of petrochemical voc's from the fresh and new plastics. I hope that by lifting the lid and doing a gas exchange once or twice a day until the last three days I can give the plastics in their now warm environment a chance to off-gas. The smell was pretty bad, and I much prefer to do what I can to alleviate the concentration of voc's so newly hatched chicks have somewhat cleaner air to breathe instead of them receiving a first breath that made me reel.

James Freyr wrote:

I hope that by lifting the lid and doing a gas exchange once or twice a day until the last three days I can give the plastics in their now warm environment a chance to off-gas.

Eggs 101: eggs are porous. Unlike Human babies that get all their oxygen from Mom breathing, chicks get the oxygen they need and expel gasses they don't want from the air around the egg. One of the way humans kill eggs from over-producing bird species like Canada Geese, is by dipping the eggs in glue to seal the egg so it no longer exchanges gasses with the surrounding atmosphere and thus dies.

So if you're smelling a lot of VOC's, I would consider it less risk to be opening the incubator, than leaving developing chicks in bad atmosphere. If preheating and airing the incubator before adding eggs wasn't in the instructions, that's the sort of comment I'd leave on their website. It's like a lot of the wood stove people tell you to do a temporary outdoor set-up and burn off the chemicals that will be on the outside of the stove that you don't want to be breathing, before installing it indoors.

Thank you so much for posting about to VOCs!
I now know to set up my incubator soonish to give it a chance to off gas, I'll also run it through a cycle, maybe not a full 21 days, but ... to make sure there isn't anything goofy going on with it.
I hadn't thought about possible VOCs. That's just plain scary.

Most incubators instructions tell you to run the incubator for hours before using it.  I think many of them even say to do that with the vents open.   You may have needed to get your eggs in there as soon as possible to maintain better hatching rates since that decreases as eggs get older.   Anyhow, you can't really hurt the eggs opening the incubator once a day, momma hens get off their nest at least once a day.  

You could effect the humidity levels, but it depends on your local climate as to how the humidity level will drop or what you will need it to be at.  

I use the Harris farms incubators and here in North Central Ohio, I had to stop putting water in my incubators as the humidity would be too high even when I didn't put water in there per the instructions with the incubator.  I had to go to using a dry hatch.  No water at all until the incubator is in lock down at day  18 through hatch at day 21.  At day 18 I fill the water reservoirs.  We are just too humid here and my incubators would be over 40 percent humidity all the time and often much higher according the readout on the incubator.  I was drowning my chicks and they didn't have enough air in the air sack because the egg couldn't lose moisture through the shell.  We don't have air conditioning in our home and I have the windows open in the spring and summer and fall so the outside humidity is the same as the inside humidity.  

I take my chicks out as soon as I see them hatched and put them under a brooder plate because if I don't they knock all the other eggs around and disturb things and make a general mess in the incubator.  I have the small brooder plate in a tote adjusted to the height of for newly hatched chicks and it works great.  No fire hazard as with a heat lamp, and safe to touch.  They dry off fine and stay under the brooder plate if they need to be warm and move away from the brooder plate if they are too cold.  

Good luck with your incubation and i hope you hatch plenty of chicks to replace the ones you lost.  

I thought I'd come back with an update.

Dismal results on our first go at incubating. 2/55 hatched successfully. A third egg was rocking back and forth but the chick never got out. Next time I will try to gently assist if I see that. One egg started oozing yolk & white about 10 days in, so it went in the compost. I believe that our poor hatch rate comes from the age of the eggs being incubated. The day we lost our flock was the day we ordered the incubator, which took a week to arrive, so the freshest eggs going on were 7 days old already, and the rest of an unknown age anywhere from 8 to 12 or 14 days, with one dozen of them being the newest carton from the fridge, which had been in the fridge for 10 or more days. It was a learning experience, and we do have two happy & healthy chicks.

Upon realizing no more eggs were going to hatch, which was about day 23, we ordered fertile eggs from a farm here in Tennessee that we found on Etsy. I had no idea selling fertile chicken eggs was such a big thing, but it is. It's something I'm going to look into offering next year. We reloaded the incubator two weeks ago with another 55 eggs. So far, four of those eggs weeped egg white & yolk and went to the compost pile. The remaining 51 look good, and pipping should begin in 6 days or so.

Great timing on this thread! Just checked my new batch, and two chicks hatched since this morning, and a third is pecking it’s way out..

James Freyr wrote:I thought I'd come back with an update.

Dismal results on our first go at incubating. 2/55 hatched successfully. A third egg was rocking back and forth but the chick never got out. Next time I will try to gently assist if I see that. One egg started oozing yolk & white about 10 days in, so it went in the compost. I believe that our poor hatch rate comes from the age of the eggs being incubated. The day we lost our flock was the day we ordered the incubator, which took a week to arrive, so the freshest eggs going on were 7 days old already, and the rest of an unknown age anywhere from 8 to 12 or 14 days, with one dozen of them being the newest carton from the fridge, which had been in the fridge for 10 or more days. It was a learning experience, and we do have two happy & healthy chicks.

Upon realizing no more eggs were going to hatch, which was about day 23, we ordered fertile eggs from a farm here in Tennessee that we found on Etsy. I had no idea selling fertile chicken eggs was such a big thing, but it is. It's something I'm going to look into offering next year. We reloaded the incubator two weeks ago with another 55 eggs. So far, four of those eggs weeped egg white & yolk and went to the compost pile. The remaining 51 look good, and pipping should begin in 6 days or so.

I've been told never to assist if a chick can't get out itself.  The theory being that and chick too weak to remove itself from the egg will be weak and unhealthy, and probably not survive anyway.  That is second-hand knowledge, so I'm just throwing it out there.  

I hope you get a great hatch this next time!

15 hatched so far, and one pecking its way out.. 41 eggs to go. A little tip: I always leave the most recently hatched bird in the incubator. It’s peeping stimulates the hatching of the next chicks.

Any updates on the chicks, James? Hopefully they all make their way out on time.

I just picked up some day old buckeye chickens from the hatchery today. 21 days ago I started 3 eggs in a little incubator and they are hatching just now.

Hi May. Yes, we just finished and had 18/55 hatch. Much better results and I'm happy with it. 20 chicks is about half of what we had, so my wife and I "rescued" another 25 chicks from the co-op and tractor supply to get back to roughly the number of laying hens we used to have. It's nice having the incubator on hand now when we do decide to either expand the flock or need replacement layers in the future.

I just completed incubating 12 Bresse eggs from Greenfire Farm plus 3 of my own mixed flock in a Brinsea Maxi 14 egg incubator that I borrowed.
Wow, it worked really well. Eight of the Bresse eggs hatched plus one of mine. I was quite happy with that rate.
It was an experiment, I'm selling the Bresse chicks to my friends as I don't have room for them right now.

James Freyr wrote:...the freshest eggs going on were 7 days old already, and the rest of an unknown age anywhere from 8 to 12 or 14 days, with one dozen of them being the newest carton from the fridge, which had been in the fridge for 10 or more days. It was a learning experience, and we do have two happy & healthy chicks.

Had all of your eggs been in the fridge? If so, I'm surprised you had even two hatch!

My understanding is that the eggs are no longer viable once the eggs go in the fridge or get too cold for more than an hour or two. I always keep my hatching eggs in a spot where they stay between 60-75 F and try to incubate them before they are more than three weeks old. At four weeks, the hatch rate goes down a lot but 1-3 weeks old kept at room temp. do very well.