counting your chickens, candling day 7

I gotta tell you
that first week of incubation, waiting for day 7 to candle
to see if there are signs of life
or if you are just slowly warming a tub'o'duds
is
excruciating!

The little Brinsea incubator has been fantastic, other than the room temperature alarm going off a few hours after setting, all I've really had to do is make sure to keep the water channel filled. Being the ii version, this can be done through an external bit without removing the incubator lid, there is a mark to fill up to which means only half the inner pot will have water in it.
The colour of the plastic can make a bit hard to see whether a top up is needed, although that is probably just the lighting in the room. Probably also worth mentioning that distilled water is reccomended for use in incubators, so I've purchased a bottle of it.
A few eggs have had to be repositioned a few times as they've moved a bit close to their neighbor on the turning plate, but it really has been pretty hands off.

The Rotohatch has been entirely different. Our more obviously damaged eggs went in here, placed in the incubator and left for 42 hours without turning, hopefully it would help the air cells settle. I trimmed down an egg carton, cutting the bottoms off as well to allow air flow around the eggs.
The 5 eggs in this incubator will stay in the cartons, incubated upright and as we obviously can't use the auto turner, I've had to place part of the remaining egg carton under one end so the eggs are tilted at about a 45 degree angle. Manual turning should happen an absolute minimum of 3 times a day - an odd number of turns means the eggs won't rest on the same side every night - I have gone for 5,
5 times a day the egg carton is turned so the opposite end is elevated, then I mark in a chart the time this happened.
Our little Rotohatch has a hygrometer built in, it tells me that the humidity in the incubator sits at around 45% with no water added. I don't really trust it to be honest, but plenty of people incubate without adding water at all until hatch so I chose to add no water and see whether there was even any development at all, and what each eggs weight loss had been like during the week before worrying too much.

So my first week has simply been: making sure the Brinsea hasn't run out of water
and fussing over the Rotohatch, While making sure to clean and sanitize my hands before touching any eggs... while nervously counting down the days until I could check inside.
I'm naturally a pretty anxious person so that part wasn't great fun, I had to keep reminding myself that it is better to not over handle the eggs now as it can damage the embryo
Finally, Friday! I expected to get great results from the Brinsea, and find nothing from the Rotohatch...
I was wrong

 

(I candle with a $20 LED torch from a hardware store)

Egg 1, one of 4 blue orpington eggs and my first egg out of the Brinsea. Theres an embryo! moving around right down by my torch! there are veins too, but they don't show up well here. The air cell is now quite obvious and growing well, i should have marked it with a pencil, but it was too hard to hold the torch, the egg and draw. So it was weighed and placed back

So that's good, one possible nugget.

Eggs 2,3 and 4 were our other blue orpingtons. These were all candled in order

all I could see was yolk... no veins, no embryo
I realised the air cell wasn't really growing larger
these were also weighed and placed back. Hmmm
Eggs 5 and 6 (black orpingtons) were the same. Warm and empty of obvious life. Weighed and returned. Well that doesn't look good.. it could be that they are slower to develop or that maybe it was just harder to see through their shell for some reason. I will candle again on day 10 and hope to see a  difference. They aren't smelly or oozing but i'll keep a watch on them.

Egg 7 on the other hand

 

Veins! and a tiny little eye! I did find it interesting that the 2 eggs closest together in in the Brinsea were the only 2 that look any good so far, but it could just be a coincidence.

 

The biggest surprise was when we moved on to the Rotohatch

 

Every single egg in there was developing! even number 12 (somehow we didn't get a photo of that one) with its worryingly shaped air cell.

I don't know if it was the extra days in the incubator withought turning, or the fact that the Rotohatch eggs are upright instead of laying down that has meant the difference in results. We aren't even using the Rotohatch as intended, I guess the eggs were probably more damaged during shipping than I thought, but we will wait until Monday night before worrying too much about writing off those 5 possible duds.

 

I've added a small tub of water to the Rotohatch as the weigh in results showed I had lost a bit more water than I had hoped, but things are looking pretty good so far!