05/22/2026
🚨TW - Graphic Video in comments🚨
It's not our first failure in our chicken-raising adventure, but it is our first failure post. My hope in posting is that someone else will learn from my rookie mistake. The adapter that moves the turn trays back and forth in some incubators caused this. 😔 I forgot to remove it whenever I put all of the eggs into the incubator this afternoon for lockdown, and it continued spinning because it was still thinking it was in pre-lockdown of the hatch cycle. I had an egg lined up perfectly under it, and it spun and cracked the egg. Fortunately, it pipped the egg and zipped it completely open, so I still have a live chick in the water sac. I took an eggshell that I had sterilized to crush and is significantly bigger than the original egg, and put it over the egg/chick to hopefully preserve it while it finishes the last 24 or so hours of its hatch cycle. I'm not very hopeful that it'll survive this. I don't want to give up on it, though, because it hasn't given up. I cranked the humidity up higher than normal with the hope that it'll prevent shrink wrapping, and if the chick does make it through, and if necessary, I'll intervene if it'll allow it a shot at life. Although I know that things will happen, I'm still heartbroken about it. 😔
*I’ll add the video of the chick still in the sac in the comments.
