Hatching and beyond

Fiona Hugh Osborne guide you through the hatching process and how to handle common problems.

The series so far has described how to create the ideal conditions to ensure your maximum clutch size is achieved. In this fourth instalment we’ll share our tips for supporting the hatch and common problems that could arise.

THE DAYS LEADING UP TO HATCH

In part 3 of this series we recommended putting some extra eggs in an incubator on the same day that the broody hen starts sitting on her eggs so that your clutch sizes are maximised.

Here’s the boring maths part! We aim for 12 chicks per broody hen. Although each of our Orpington hens is capable of supporting up to 15 chicks, they can only safely cover 12 eggs during the incubation period. Given that we have an average hatch rate of approximately 80% we allocate 15 eggs per hen. We give 12 eggs to our broody hens and put 3 eggs in an incubator. This should give us 12 hatched chicks per hen. These numbers relate to our Orpington large fowl birds and may need to be altered for other breeds.

At days 7 and 14 we will candle the eggs, discard any that are not fertile replacing any non-viable eggs under the broody hen with viable eggs from the incubator.

MONITORING THE HATCH

The wonderful thing about working with broody hens to incubate, hatch and raise your chicks is that they take all of the effort out of raising the chicks. They make sure they’re fed, watered and kept warm and dry. Having said that, we would recommend that hatching is monitored closely as broody hens have a mind of their own and it’s at this point that things can go wrong.