I decided to try an incubator this year, having given up hope on my hens’ maternal instincts. A week into the process I was having doubts, like a first time mother, and decided to give my egg candler (a flashlight,) a try. After candling my eggs, I can only say that it was awkward, and I feel like I should have left well enough alone.
I have gone from having twenty one eggs in the incubator to having 19. One of the two I removed turned out to be unfertilized as I suspected. The other one, which I removed because I thought it looked very porous, turned out to have what was probably a viable chick growing inside.
Not only did I destroy a viable egg and kill a one week chicken embryo, but I opened my incubator to do it. I might have disturbed the development of my other eggs just by handling each one of them and turning them around to try to see better what was inside.
All the eggs are brown which, I read, makes them harder to see through than white eggs. I just really wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but I divided my remaining eggs into two groups. One group is of eggs that I thought might be developing nicely, of which I have nine. The other group of ten eggs looked very porous to me, so I thought that maybe they weren’t doing so well. But now I’m really not sure what to think.
I decided to just keep my incubator closed until the three day countdown, when I am supposed to remove them from the egg turner. I will probably mark one group at that time, just to find out if the truth approximates my suspicions.
