On the evening of Sunday the 26th of November I quit turning the 4 remaining Rotohatch eggs, apparently it is a good idea to stop here with air cell damaged eggs as you can give them a little longer to get into hatch position. We didn't candle on this day.
I've read that by this time, turning eggs is less important. I was worried though, on day 14 we removed a quitter, our chances of anything hatching were narrowing, would anyone make it out of their egg?
The Brinsea incubator hummed away, and every 45 minutes it would beep and slide the turning disk around on it's own, the eggs would roll over.
On Monday evening I re read through the manuals again, several times. One thing that confused me... the Brinsea said it's automatic turning would stop when the counter on top said there was only 2 days left... but that would be on day 19, isn't lock down day 18? so I spent a good chunk of my evening scrolling through forums, hatching calculators and web pages trying to figure out when I should prepare the eggs for hatch day.
Seems you can stop turning about day 16 or 19 if you want, and it also seems most people locked down day 18, so that's what we went for.
Tuesday evening, anxious as ever, i prepared my notebook full of egg weights, jewelry scales and torch. We started with the Brinsea, carefully removed the lid, removed the turning tray for cleaning as it would no longer be needed
and replaced with a piece of non slip shelf liner. The Brinsea Mini ii advance comes with a piece of corrugated cardboard cut into the exact shape needed, it's designed to be used during hatching and thrown away. You do need something non slip here as if your chicks hatch onto a slippery surface it can cause leg issues when they try wandering around.
I'm not actually sure where in New Zealand to get replacements of the Brinsea cardboard ones, (although they are available) so it made more sense to just use it as a template for the shelf liner.
Egg 1 and egg 7 were weighed and candled
They were right on track! weight loss maybe a touch more than i'd hope, the embryo now fills most of the egg. There are good visible veins. Air cell for egg one looked great, air cell for egg 7 was a bit saddle shaped but should be okay. I marked the area of the air cell with a pencil, placed the lid on the incubator, turned off the auto turn function and filled up both sides of the water cup to raise humidity.
Moving on to the Rotohatch
Egg 9 and 10 both looked like this, good!
I'm pretty sure this is egg 12, unfortunately it doesn't show up well here but the air cell on this egg was massive, taking up probably half of the egg. The embryo moved but was far smaller than it should have been. We weren't sure that this chick would develop enough to hatch, and even if it did, whether it would have enough room to turn so it could pip and hatch.
Egg 11 didn't look great either, it was hard to find the air cell, weight loss was good and the embryo was a good size, but there were no veins, only a cloudy area above the embryo. We kept it in anyway just incase. If it had quit, it was definitely recent, I didn't think the chances of it rotting and exploding were high. Plus we just didn't feel sure.
Eggs 9 and 10 were moved into the Brinsea where i felt they had a better chance, we cut down egg cartons to fit so they could stand vertically with their air cells upright.
Eggs 1 and 7 were left horizontal.
In the Rotohatch, we filled the entire base with 10mm of water, placed the cleaned and disinfected lower hatching tray in with a piece of shelf liner on it. Eggs 11 and 12 were placed on it in their egg carton.
Nothing to do now but keep water topped up in the Brinsea and wait
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