Incubate an egg with your body warmth

I heard about a technique of incubating eggs with your own body temperature… here is a video.



I think it’s nice to have an option for doing so both portably and without electricity. And the human body is going to be quite close in terms of humidity and heat to most other warm blooded animals including chickens and other birds.

this reminded me of a video i saw recently about how chili pepper seeds are sprouted in colder regions of northern china, where they need to be planted out when it's still cold. seeds soaked and tucked inside a person's shirt for a few days until they sprout tails and then are planted out. Now between eggs, chili pepper seeds and making yogurt with your own body heat you could probably manage to fill up an entire vest!!

Too late this year but I’d love to try that with the peppers!

I'd be more willing to try this with seeds than eggs in my ecosystem. I expect this would be much harder to do in my cool climate.

Also, saving a single egg has the downside of chick being totally imprinted on the human and won't know how to interact with fellow chickens. This is already an issue with incubator chicks hatched as a group, but at least they have fellow chicks around even if not adult chicken input.

Also, if the goal is to have a back-up to your incubator, I suspect having a back-up heat source like a fire, which can bring a pan of water up to 100F or so, would be more helpful. Incubators come in different sizes and shapes, but the larger the pot of water, and the smaller a space you can create around the incubator, the better the odds of the eggs surviving a long power outage.

Last but not least, that single chick will need heat even after hatch. Joel Salatin I recall uses heat from decomposition to keep chicks warm, but he's normally raising a large group and "huddle heat" is a thing supporting the decomposition warmth.

I admit I'm totally biased to getting a mother hen to do the job if at all possible! If I want more chicks than the hen can reliably set, I've put eggs in the incubator and under mom at the same time, then in the dark, when the chicks have hatched, we add the extras to the nest, and so far, it's worked out well.

Now I want to rig up some kind of spaghetti western style bandoleer to have a dozen eggs cooking at the same time that I can wear around. I'll have my own flock without the burden of having to store an incubator!

I am wondering how the original video managed to maintain the need to rotate the egg as it develops in order to have success hatching the chicks.

Timothy Norton wrote: I am wondering how the original video managed to maintain the need to rotate the egg as it develops in order to have success hatching the chicks.

My understanding is rotating the eggs 3 to 5 times per day is ideal. I'm not convinced that the mother hen is waking up in the night to turn them either! Five times seems to get a good hatch rate, with 3 being the minimum. This is why it's important to mark one side of the egg, ideally with a grease pencil.  In the video, they marked the egg with words, and I suspect that was to help make sure the egg got turned properly.

Normally, at about day 19, the eggs go into "lockdown" and you stop turning them, so they can start to pip without getting dizzy. This may not be as critical as people make out, as I've seen the eggs go rolling when they're on the incubator screen after I remove the turner. I started putting down an old flannel diaper to increase the friction.

Jay has the crucial suggestion, I think. Certain rotating can change the dynamics.  To promote fertilization or otherwise.   friend John Warren , a mighty captain/ mate /crewman on circumnavigating  sailboats,  swore  that rotation can change internal egg activity. He was sailing around the globe, so healthy protein was  quite important for food supply.

Please correct me. There are tales of  room temperature eggs  lasting  for months in off grid situations. Rotation was also part of that regiment , but I wasn't observing. Are there any pirates here for corroboration?  I am curious

Off grid folks might benefit from these  ideas

Wouldn’t rotation happen when you move around or is there more to it?

I would expect that having some sort of a wire frame to prevent the eggs from being crushed would be beneficial. I like Timothy’s idea of having multiple eggs in the system at once, but it seems like there would be need for more involved protection than just a little cardboard box.