Eight Easy Steps To Perfect Chick Hatching

I started out hatching and raising chickens, without any experience, and so can you!  Follow my  8 easy steps:

1. Make sure you start with fresh, healthy, fertilized eggs.Discard any that are cracked or have any odor.  Do not use any eggs older than two weeks.
2. Get a good incubator.  In my opinion Brinsea is the best for people starting out.  I started out with the Brinsea Mini Advance and then moved up to a Brinsea Octagon Advance because it holds more eggs than the Mini and it is easier to monitor humidity levels than the Mini.
3. Set the temperature between 99.4 -99.6 degrees F.
4. Make sure that from day one through day twenty your humidity is consistently between 40-50%.  I add water daily to my Brinsea incubator to ensure consistent humidity at this level.
5. Ensure that the eggs are being rotated regularly, just as the mother hen would do herself.  Brinsea ensures that this occurs do you don’t have to worry about it.
6. On day 19, stop the rotation on your device (on the Octagon just remove the cradle) so that the eggs remain stable and remove any brackets holding the eggs in place
7. On day 21, add enough water to get humidity levels to 65%.This will enable the chicks to peck out of their shell.
8. This is the hardest but most important step.  Do not take the cover off your incubator until nearly all eggs have hatched.  This may take up to three days!  I learned the hard way.  If you take the cover off, even briefly, the change in humidity can literally shrink wrap all chicks in eggs in the process of hatching and  increase their mortality rate substantially.  Tempting as it may be, leave them alone!  Don’t worry about getting them food and water right away; for up to 72 hours after they hatch, baby chicks are still ingesting their yolk sacs. This provides them all the nourishment they need.
   Not all of your eggs may hatch, some may start to pip and then stop.  There is usually a good reason they are not strong enough to survive,  it is  normal to not have a 100% hatch rate.  After 24- 36 hours from the first chick hatch you may transfer the chicks to their next home: either the Brinsea Ecoglow Brooder or beneath a  250 Watt Red Heat Lamp.  I started with the red heat lamp and switched to the Ecoglow brooder because A. it is cheaper to maintain, and B. it is much safer.  I will discuss this more in “When Your Chicks have Hatched”