Hatching Process and When to Help

Hatching your own eggs is a wonderful experience. Caring for the eggs, making sure the temperature is just right, ensuring there is enough humidity, and then going through the nerve wracking experience of watching the chicks’ struggle to escape the shell can be very rewarding. After all of your hard work, of course you will be nervous the little ones hatch successfully. Then you see one that seems to be in trouble. Your first instinct may be to help it, and that is fine, but you should know a few things first.

As it incubates, the embryo is encased by a membrane consisting of blood vessels. These vessels provide oxygen that enters the egg through the shell to the embryo. Several days before hatching, this network of vessels begins to break down and the embryo lacks sufficient oxygen. The egg will have slowly dried out during incubation, forming an air sack. This sack is pierced by the chick in order to get oxygen. Since there is not a lot of air in the sack, the chick will continue to peck until it ‘pips’ a tiny protrusion on the shell which allows for a greater flow of oxygen. After pipping, the chick will rest for 12 to 24 hours.

Once the chick has rested, it starts to make its way out of the egg. It starts at the pip before turning slightly and pecking again. The chick will continue this pattern around the egg until it forms a ‘lid’ which it can push open and wiggle out the rest of the way. During this process, the chick will take several breaks until it is finished about 1 to 3 hours later.

These rest periods are where most nervous soon-to-be bird parents think they are needed the most. After seeing and hearing movement only to have them go quiet and still can be stressful. Knowing when and when not to help a chick hatch is important.

When you help could mean life or death for the chick. If you help before the network of blood veins has completely broken down, you can cause the chick to bleed to death. Following are three scenarios and our recommendations for each.

• The chick forms a hole where it pipped and does not start rotating within the shell. In this situation you must be careful as not everything went as it should. You can try to help, but stop and try several hours later if you see blood forming where you have broken the shell.
  
  In the following video, we did not see blood until the 'lid' had been taken off. Make sure to stop and try again several hours later whenever you see blood.
  
  

  
  
• If the duckling has started turning and breaking the shell, then runs into a problem and stops turning, you can normally help them without a problem. The key is they have started turning in the shell which means the blood vessels under the shell have shut down and you can help them without fear of excessive bleeding. Gently pull the head out from under the wing and allow the chick to escape the rest of the egg on its own.
  
  The following video shows a variety of eggs where the 'lid' has not been developed and the chick has not turned, but we were able to help them because there was no blood.
  
  

  
  
• If the chick has gone completely around and formed a ‘lid’ only to get stuck, you can definitely help them out by removing the cap.
  
  

Many believe that helping during hatch will make the chick weak. This is not necessarily true. You could have a perfectly healthy and fit chick, but due to less than ideal incubation conditions, it may not be able to hatch on its own. On the flip side, it is possible to get a weaker chick when helping a less than healthy chick to hatch. As author and waterfowl expert Holderread says, hatching is like a “fitness test” for the chicks.

Are my eggs fertile?

A common question that we get is if the eggs, whether they are the eggs they receive from us, eggs their own ducks are laying, or eggs they find out in the wild, are fertile. The simple answer is that we do not know.

One way to find out if your egg is fertile is to crack it open. While this does prevent you from incubating the egg, it does tell you if an egg is fertile. Maybe you just wanted to check to make sure your single male was fertile. It is also a great way to check fertility if you are eating some of your eggs. If you look closely at the yolk and see a white doughnut shaped spot, then the egg was fertile. If the white spot was solid and irregularly shaped, then it was infertile.

Fertile egg

Infertile egg

The only way to find out if your egg is fertile without cracking it open is to incubate and then candle the egg. This normally takes about six days before you can clearly see development in the egg. You can use our candling photos on our website to track the development of your eggs.

If you do not see development after six days, we suggest you continue incubating as it could be that your flashlight is not strong enough (see our candling page for explanation). If you don’t see anything by ten days, then you know for sure your eggs were either infertile or died very early in development.

We guarantee that 80% of our eggs will be fertile and alive at first candling. This does not mean that we guarantee 80% hatch as there is also a spike in mortality the two days before hatching.The most common times for the embryo to die are the first several days of incubation and the last several days before hatching. So an egg that died early in incubation was truly fertile as it started to grow, but oftentimes these early deaths and truly infertile eggs are called “infertile”. This early death can be caused by many things and is typically caused by incubator conditions - over which we have no control.  

The Power of Science

In the future, there is a possibility of identifying fertile eggs without breaking them open or incubating them. Several research teams have been developing processes to determine the fertility and even the sex of an egg without cracking it and before it goes into an incubator. Egg Farmers of Ontario in concert with Michael Ngadi from McGill University have found a way to determine fertility and sex of an egg using various light waves and are working to make it commercially available to hatcheries. At the same time, Vital Farms in the USA and Novatrans in Israel are looking to put their invention into commercial production which uses the gases exuded from an egg to determine fertility and sex.

This is exciting for large commercial hatcheries producing laying chicks as they do not have a market for the male chicks and currently put down the excess males after hatching. If they can determine the sex before incubation, the male eggs could be sold for consumption. Likewise, infertile eggs could be sold for consumption and money would not be spent on labor and equipment to incubate infertile eggs that have no chance of hatching. These processes should be available to large hatcheries within several years, but when this technology filters down to us and hobby hatcheries

is anyone’s guess. So until that happens you have to do what has been done for the past century - break the egg or incubate it to determine if it is fertile.