Candling Eggs

Day 14 of egg incubation equals candling time again! 

We already candled the eggs on day 7 to check for signs of life. There were a few eggs that we weren't sure about, so we left those in the incubator. Both of us were looking forward to seeing how many of them were good! 

A lot of our eggs have dark shells, so it's kind of tricky to see what's going on inside. We discovered that G's phone camera can show a little bit more about what's going on inside. Here are a couple pictures we took while candling: 

Hard to see, but both of these have chicks growing inside! One week to go before they are due to hatch. 

We did find some duds. 

These eggs were removed from the incubator. We had eight more we weren't sure about, so we left those in. They are all on the right side of the incubator and the good ones are on the left. 

On day 18 we can candle again. After that, the incubator will be locked down until the eggs hatch. From what I've read, there isn't much of a benefit to candling on day 18. The chicks should be big enough you won't be able to see much of anything besides the air sac. However the air sac can shed some light on the humidity amount in the incubator. 

If the air sac is too small from too high humidity, the chick won't have enough air and can drown. If the air sac is too large from too low humidity, the chick can also die. We need a Goldilocks amount of humidity. Unfortunately that's not a simple answer. Because of different climates/the time of year, humidity levels can be all over the place.

Our incubator has an automatic humidity detector, but sometimes those are off on their measurements. Just in case, we have a second humidity detector we put towards the edge of the incubator. They're reading pretty close together. Judging by our air sacs, our humidity is a little high. This week, we're going to let it get pretty low to see if we can get the air sacs to an ideal volume before the 18th. We'll check their size on the 18th to determine how much water we need to add to the incubator before hatching.