Doan count your chickens ...

[ncboman]

I have eggs in the incubator that should be hatching out any day now. :)

I got the eggs off ebay so who knows what the hatch rate will be but with grandson playin along, it'll be fun regardless. :D

We have 12 welsummers, 6 buff orpingtons, and 4 turkey eggs of unknown variety. The turkey eggs will take a little longer so we'll see how that's gonna play out. I have a brooder but haven't put it together yet. Probably do that tonight so I can get the chicks moved from the incubator quickly.

I need more land. :rolleyes:

ncboman

[LampLighter]

Evict the young mini bike repair shop entrpeneur :D .

[ncboman]

Evict the young mini bike repair shop entrpeneur :D .

We're tryin to put together a purchase of some nearby property for that purpose. ;)

ncboman

[ncboman]

Glad I didn't count those chickens. :(

I had an amazing 0% hatch rate on the chickens.

I'll post more on this in a bit and see if we can salvage anything of value from the experience.

ncboman

[Altjaeger]

Glad I didn't count those chickens. :(

I had an amazing 0% hatch rate on the chickens.

I'll post more on this in a bit and see if we can salvage anything of value from the experience.

ncboman

Any analysis yet? Possibly did not stay warm in shipment? Maybe a incubator plug in a receptacle wired to a light switch? or...?

[ncboman]

mostly my own fault. :mad:

I hadn't run the incubator in a couple years and when I fired it up for warmup I noticed the temp too high ... so I backed it off. I should have known then something won't right. We've hatched many eggs with the setting like it was.

It wasn't until the eggs didn't hatch I started looking at things closely and found my old thermometer had slipped on the scale and I was only running about 90deg . :eek:

I have a new batch of eggs going now and am using a better thermometer until a new digital arrives.

I screwed up. It doan happen often but I ain't perfect. :o

ncboman

[Twanger]

With the grandson involved it's gonna be fun!
I'm interested in hearing how it goes...

[ncboman]

He hasn't been the problem I kinda expected. :)

I keep the incubator in my off limits hunting closet anyway so he hasn't been playing with it or the eggs ... yet. Probably because he doesn't fully realise the outcome. Once the chicks hatch, we'll see what happens. :)

This delay has thrown my intended schedule off. I want to hatch a bunch of quail eggs but now have to wait. I envision 40 to 50+ quail hangin around the yard toward the end of summer. ;)

ncboman

[Bill Gunn]

I'm interested in your progress too.
We use to raise a lot of chickens here when the kids were home. I'd order 100 chicks each year.
8 weeks later we would butcher 50, and keep the others for a while for eggs, and soup meat.
Back then all the neighbor kids ran trap lines. Now nobody does, and we're flooded with coons, foxes, and some coyotes. The chickens we use to raise were free ranging. I don't think they'd last more than a week outside now :(

[ncboman]

The eggs are out of the turner and I've upped the humidity to around 60%. Hopefully this weekend something will happen. :)

ncboman

[ncboman]

I am a failure as a mother. This batch didn't hatch either. :o

You wouldn't know it from my results, but actually I know quite a bit about this stuff and have hatched hundreds of chicks in the past from this same incubator.

In hatching eggs, the first 4 days and the last 4 days are the most important and I blew it on the first 4 days of this batch running low temps for over the first week. Even after I got the digital thermometer, the temps weren't exactly right. The digital isn't accurate but of course I didn't find this out until I was well into the setting. I let the eggs go another week just to make sure but what a fiasco. zip.

Anyway, I think I have my original GQ thermometer reset to the calibrations correctly and it is an extremely accurate thermometer made for this purpose. I'm running the incubator empty right now to make absolutely sure I have the temp running steady at 99.5 before I start another batch.

I'm not one to get whipped and quit so my determination has become fairly strong at this point. :rolleyes:

ncboman

[Rock Chuck]

Makes you wonder how a bird does it so well. They have built in thermostats in their butts. In hot weather, I've watched killdeers squat down over the eggs but not on them, hovering over them with their wings spread like an umbrella.