Hatch day is our favorite day! A successful hatch is such a rewarding experience, no matter how many times you do it, and hatching eggs will give you a whole new appreciation for the amazing and complex biological processes required to generate new life. Shipped hatching eggs also give you access to superior bloodlines, genetic diversity, and breeds you wouldn't normally have access to.
In this post, we’re going give you a general overview of the incubation process, specifically for shipped eggs, which isn’t quite so simple as popping eggs into the incubator and setting a timer for 21 days later.
We've also provided a free PDF download of our HATCHING EGG RECORD sheets at the end!
But first off, lets address the elephant in the room when it comes to hatching shipped eggs:
SHIPPED HATCHING EGGS ARE A GAMBLE
Whether you’re buying your hatching eggs from us or another breeder, be aware that shipped hatching eggs generally have a lower overall success rate than eggs laid and set right on the farm. This is par for the course. It is absolutely normal. It is (almost always and with few exceptions) not the breeders’ fault. Where we may get regular hatch rates of 90% on some breeds or even higher on farm, shipped hatching eggs set at the same time and given the same treatment during incubation can have a much lower hatch rate. This is to be expected.
Unfortunately, many newcomers to shipped hatching eggs go into this believing that hatching eggs are hatching eggs regardless of how they get them, and that their hatch rates on shipped eggs will invariably be the same as on-farm rates. This is simply not true.
FACTORS AFFECTING HATCH RATES IN SHIPPED EGGS
The Breed Itself: Some breeds are more difficult to hatch than others, and for a variety of reasons. Marans, for example, have a bit of a reputation for being more difficult to hatch, due in part to the hardness of their dark shells. Rare breeds have a tendency to be more difficult to hatch, in general, and can be more sensitive to the rigors of transit. This is where it's important to chat with your breeder about their previous experiences with customers shipping and hatching their eggs (this information isn't always available to them because customers quite often do not follow up, but never hurts to ask), their on farm hatch rates, and the vigor of the chicks. Good breeders want you to be successful and are generally more than happy to chat with you about how to have that success with their breed and the specific line(s) they're working with within that breed.
Shipping: When we say “rigors of transit,” we’re talking about the way USPS handles packages. They don’t go easy on them. This is where excellent packaging plays an absolutely critical role, but even with great packaging and every egg arriving seemingly intact, sometimes there’s trauma to the embryos from shipping that you just can’t see.
Fluctuations in Temperature/Humidity: Shipped eggs are even more sensitive to spikes or drops in temperature or humidity than on farm eggs. Make sure that your incubator is up and running, maintaining steady temperature and humidity, prior to eggs arriving so any tweaking can be done BEFORE the eggs are set. These spikes or drops in temperature or humidity WILL contribute to your mortality rate and can even result in chicks that do hatch having congenital defects, as those embryos are incredibly sensitive, especially in the first 7 days of development.
To put things into perspective, we’ve shipped in HUNDREDS of hatching eggs in our journey to acquire our stock, and even when buying from good breeders, using professional grade equipment, and having quite a bit of experience in hatching, we’re ecstatic to get a 50% hatch rate on eggs we ship in because we KNOW what those eggs go through to reach us. Better than 50%, and we're on Cloud 9!
These variables are why there are generally no guarantees from breeders on hatch rates.
Our recommendation to you is that if you are not willing to accept the reality that shipped hatching eggs are a gamble, order chicks instead.
Now that that’s over, lets get to the good stuff: setting yourself up for success with your shipped hatching eggs!
SELECTING EQUIPMENT + SETTINGS
THE INCUBATOR
We are working with a GQF 1500 series cabinet incubator (and separate hatcher), and absolutely love it. It’s been a game changer for our program. Cabinet incubators are quite expensive up front, but if you’re going to be hatching on a regular basis, they’re lifesavers and we highly recommend them.
Lots of tabletop incubator models are available out there and lots of them work quite well. We have heard good things about both Brisnea and Nurture Right 360 models, although we've not used those brands personally.
We do recommend, from experience and lots of frustration, that you skip the still air models and get a forced-air model with an automatic egg turner. While you CAN hatch in a still air incubator, and we certainly have, we’ve found that they are prone to hot and cold spots, and our hatch rates were way higher in forced-air models because they disperse the heat more evenly, resulting in a more equal incubation across the board. By the time you buy a still air model, end up getting frustrated with eggs getting cooked wrong and rig a fan into it and then decide that having to turn by hand multiple times a day isn’t fun so then you buy the automatic turner, you could have just bought the incubator with both features built in and saved yourself (a lot) of grief.
TEMPERATURE & HUMIDITY
We like to set our eggs at 100.0 degrees Fahrenheit and maintain that temperature throughout the incubation and hatching process. Humidity can be trickier, as the ambient humidity varies by your geographical location and other factors, even down to where you have your incubator placed in your home. Generally, the recommendation for humidity is to incubate around 50% and then bump to 60-70% for hatching. In our situation, we’ve had excellent results at 50% humidity through incubation and bump up to 55-60% for hatching. Humidity is something you’ll have to play around with and find out what works in your particular location and equipment.
GET A SECONDARY HYGROMETER: This is key. Even in our professional incubator and hatcher, we don’t leave temperature and humidity to chance. Hygrometers are cheap, and leaving one in your incubator to have a second measurement of temperature and humidity against the readings your incubator provides could make all the difference, or even save your hatch if your machine isn't accurate. Inkbird has good ones, and they even have alert systems, Bluetooth features, and an app for some of their hygrometers if you want a more high tech setup.
PLACE YOUR INCUBATOR WELL: Put your incubator in a room where it will be safe from being bumped or turned over by you, pets, children, etc. There should be no drafts and it shouldn't be overly warm or overly cold. Do not put your incubator in direct sunlight (sunny-side up is not how we like our hatching eggs).
THE INCUBATION PROCESS
TREATMENT ON ARRIVAL
When shipped eggs arrive, we recommend keeping them in the egg cartons with the pointed side down for at LEAST 12 hours, preferably 24, to allow the eggs to come to room temperature and let those air cells reposition after transit. We like to candle eggs at this point and mark any with questionable air cells so we can identify them later.
SETTING THE EGGS
After the eggs have had sufficient time to come to room temperature and the air cells are repositioned as well as possible, it’s time to set the eggs. Personally, we don’t wash eggs prior to setting as we don’t want to remove the natural protective coating, the “bloom,” that resides on the shells. We just don’t set eggs that are overly dirty to begin with and we refrain from shipping eggs that are overly dirty as well. Eggs are set with the pointed side down. If you have eggs with detached air cells, it can be a good idea to refrain from turning them for a day or two to allow those air cells the best chance of reattaching.
THE FIRST SEVEN DAYS
We don’t touch the eggs until Day 7, whether they’re on farm or shipped in. Those first days are critical for early embryonic development, and we like to just let our incubator work. At Day 7, we perform our first candling. At this stage, you’re looking for a dark dot and some veins running vertically down the egg. Typically, if an egg looks like a “maybe,” we’ll give it until Day 10 before we discard it.
DAY 10 CANDLING
The Day 10 candling is where you really get to see some action in the embryos. The air cell is getting a more defined, the veins should be more prominent, and at this stage, the embryos are really responsive to stimuli and you’ll see them moving around inside when you shine the light through. Eggs with a noticeable “blood ring” around the egg should be discarded. Those are embryos that gave it a good faith effort but have unfortunately died.
DAY 18 CANDLING & LOCKDOWN
At Day 18, it’s time to candle eggs and discard any that look to have died since the last candling and place the remainder of the eggs on lockdown. The lockdown period is the final three days prior to hatch, wherein we cease turning the eggs, bump up the humidity, and the chicks will position themselves for hatch.
In our setup, eggs are removed from the incubator and placed in the hatcher in baskets on their sides to allow chicks to move into position. There are a few breeds we like to hatch vertically, but we'll get into that in another post.
HATCHING TIME
Day 20 and 21 are the most exciting: in the hours prior to hatch, chicks absorb the yolk and eventually pierce the membrane inside the egg, giving them access to the air cell. The “pipping” process starts on the inside and once they puncture through that interior membrane with their egg tooth, they begin cheeping to alert other chicks at the same stage that it’s time to hatch. One by one, they make their first crack in the eggs shortly thereafter.
Once chicks are pipped externally, the race to the finish line is on. Chicks rotate inside the egg, slowly working through the shell and eventually using their legs to shove right out of it. From the first pip, hatching is usually wrapped up within 24 hours or so.
Try to keep the incubator closed up as much as possible during hatch; big fluctuations in temperature and humidity caused by opening it can lead to problems like "sticky chick," where the membranes dry to the chicks and keep them from hatching.
CLEAN UP
Once your chicks are hatched and you've gotten them moved into their brooder, it’s time to clean up. One quick way to sabotage your next hatch rate is to NOT clean your equipment. Hatching chicks is a wet, stinky business and getting those egg shells and GOOP out of there as quickly as possible is a MUST to prevent colonies of bacteria from setting up camp in your equipment. We disinfect after every hatch with Chlorhexidine solution, which is an easily accessible disinfectant that works against both gram positive and gram negative bacteria. We wash the hatching baskets and egg trays and then spray them down with it and allow them to air dry.
And that's pretty much the overall gist of how we hatch eggs!
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