Hatching Chicks - Starting the Incubation

One tip for you, DON’T order or buy any eggs until you physically have had the incubator delivered. I ordered our incubator over a week ago and had expected it on Wednesday or Thursday of this week – I ordered the eggs afterwards and assumed (wrongly) that everything would arrive as promised.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the case and Friday night saw myself and my partner driving 30 miles to the Ebay sellers house to get another incubator as mine had been lost in the post. This wouldn’t usually be a problem, however as we already had the 12 eggs that we wanted to incubate, this couldn’t really wait as the viability of eggs reduces significantly after the 7th day. Therefore if you want little chicks, you really need to stick them into an incubator before day 7!

As soon as we got home, we read the incubator instructions and set it up and plugged it in. Another tip we read on the internet was that it’s a good idea to check that your incubator works properly by letting it run for at least 24-36 hours BEFORE you stick the eggs in. As our incubator is a very basic model, the temperature is already set to the ‘ideal’ which is 37.5 degrees Celsius. Therefore all we had to do was pop some water into one of the water troughs and turn it on. We turned it on, on Friday night and popped the eggs in on Saturday morning – we then watched the temperature in the incubator drop quite a lot – don’t panic if this happens! If you think about it, a lot of the space in the incubator has just been replaced by eggs which (should be) are room temperature, therefore it will take the incubator a long time to heat the eggs enough to get back to its original temperature.

Another interesting thing to remember – when you put the eggs in the incubator, this isn’t ‘day 1’, it’s actually day 0 and for the first 24 hours, you don’t need to turn the eggs – this starts on day 1. Therefore it meant that my partner and I were able to go out and about and not worry about turning the eggs as this didn’t start until this morning (Sunday). Remember to put an ‘X’ and a ‘O’ on each side of the eggs – this way you won’t screw up turning them. I did actually manage to print out a spreadsheet and we are filling it in every day and writing down the time we are turning them – we’re doing this 3 times a day. When we wake up, when we get back from work and before we go to bed. There’s loads of literature out there which tells you how many times you should turn eggs, from what I can gather:

- It should be an odd number of turns
- It should be a minimum of 3 times a day
- You should try and do it as quickly as possible but the eggs are OK for up to 30 minutes outside the incubator
- You shouldn’t turn the eggs after day 18 as you could damage the chick
- The pointy end of the egg should be slightly down
- The temperature in the room you have the incubator should be between 20 degrees and 25 degrees

My hands were shaking this morning as it was the first time we had to turn the eggs and I was so worried about hurting them or dropping one! I was also worried that some of the eggs have turned slightly speckled and having read various internet sites, that seems to suggest that the eggs is full of bacteria :-S That being said, it could just be the fact that the humidity has increased a lot so I guess we shall see when we candle them on day 8!