The third major hatching for the 2011 turkey season is arriving! I awoke this morning to the soft chirping of the first baby turkey. This little fellow is the first of 47 siblings due to hatch over the next 3 days.
Interesting observation... The first one or two days of hatching are usually the strongest birds... Quickest to hatch out and walk.
There are too many eggs in this batch to place them all into the hatching tray you see here. The reason is htat in the incubating trays hte eggs can sit on eng, big end up. But for hatching they musy lay on the side, which takes more room. So you cant fully move one incubating tray of 36 turkey eggs to the hatching tray. Our plan is to turn off the egg turner for the ay, and rotate out the hatched turkeys every couple hours until all the due to hatch eggs are down below. then we can turn on the turner again. During those few hours we will need to turn the incubating eggs manually every time we check on them. Ideally the eggs should be turned every hour to ensure that the developing embryos do not "stick" to the side of hte shell and grow improperly. This is a very important job that hte mother hen takes care of when sitting on her own nest. Without turning the rate of proper hatching of healthy birds is dismally low.
Isnt nature amazing!
UPDATE: We moved the two newly hatched poults to the brooder this morning, bringing the total to 51. Unfortunately one didnt make it overnight which drops it back to 50.
ReplyDeletethere was no visible signs of distress or illness on the one that didnt make it, but at this stage its really difficult to tell why the fragile little birds have struggles. Nevertheless, the overall nuimbers for this breed are good yet, we only lost 2 out of nearly 60 hatched.
UPDATE: This evening we added 9 more hatched turkeys to the brooder, bringing the total to 59.We almost have enough cleared out to return to normal routine in the incubator, but not quite. Hopefully by late tonight.
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