Incubating eggs

 Olga is sitting on some runner duck eggs. I am hoping she can hatch at least one female that we can keep.

I have just put 54 eggs in to the incubator (I’ll add 2 more tomorrow morning so it is full).

There are 24 bielefelder that I ordered from someone by post. The others are from our chickens.

The bielefelder are what is called auto sexing which means you can tell when the chicks hatch the males from the females. You also get ones called ‘sex linked’ which are certain cross breeds where you can tell the chicks apart at hatch, but if you breed the young ones it doesn’t carry on.

When I was ordering the eggs I was really tempted by various ones with coloured eggs (dark brown, blue, green etc - really fun but not very useful!) I restrained myself though. Maybe next year!

For the eggs that came through the cell I looked at each one to see how healthy the air cell looked. It is meant to sit in the fat end of the egg, but when they get all shaken around in transit they can come detached. Only one seemed to have an air cell that had split in 2 (bad!), though there were some I just couldn’t make out at all. This one is nicely in the right place. It will grow as the eggs develop (because some water evaporates from the egg) and eventually the chick will pip in to the air cell (internal pip) and then through the shell (external pip). 

So many eggs! The incubator has an auto turner, but I won’t turn it on until 2 days in because of the shipped eggs. They sat for 24 hours (fat end up) before going in the incubator, and this extra time before starting turning will hopefully allow them to settle a bit more...

I weigh a sample set. This is the left hand basket. I will use this to help ensure the humidity is right. I want them to lose about 13% of their weight during incubation and I will weigh them every few days to make sure we are on track for that...