Our first E-Section.

Meet Uno...........

We tried to incubate our second batch of eggs the last few weeks. We did the same thing we did with the first, but had very different results. Our first hatch, we had 11 out of 14 eggs hatch and that was great. They eggs had been shipped over a couple states and they say a 50 % hatch rate with shipped eggs is really good. So for this hatch I bought some eggs that were more rare and more expensive and did everything else the same. I have checked these eggs over the last couple weeks (called candling) and thought all but a couple questionable ones were duds. Very disappointing considering they had been a little more pricey and I really wanted some of these in my flock. So last Thursday (which was technically hatch day, day 21) I am walking through the kitchen and I hear peeping. Leah was in there and I asked if she heard it also, sure enough she did. I was happy to see that the eggs werent a complete loss. By Friday morning, the peeping from inside the egg had lessoned and the chick had yet to make a pip.

I will spare you all the research I have done, but the basics of hatching is that a chick will pip a hole in the egg and zip a line completely around the egg and then push itself out. Many things can go wrong, but if you have a good humidity level and temperature in your incubator, it is usually best to let nature take it's course. My temps were good, but for some reason my humidity was a little low.

We woke up Saturday morning and the chick had pipped and was still peeping a little. I notices though that the membrane around the chick was very dry and somewhat shrink wrapping the chick. Not good. By 3:00 Saturday, the chick had made no more progress. It can take 12 hours for a chick to completely zip around the egg, but they usually make consistant progress. I decided, after much research, to intervene. I did not want to lose the one chick who was trying to make it, but often times intervening can do more harm than good. They can bleed to death and all kinds of ickiness can happen. We were fortunate and the E-section worked! We zipped the rest of the egg with a bamboo skewer and were very fortunate that the chick was ready to come out. It was indeed shrink wrapped in it's membrane and I am sure it would have died had we not intervened. Yeah!!

Julie