A quail chick at around three days old - tiny, but growing like a weed.

After eighteen days in the incubator, disaster struck. A day before the eggs were due to hatch, the incubator was accidentally switched off overnight. The temperature fell to just 25 degrees and stayed there for around ten hours. Despairing and distraught, our first reaction was to call the whole project off, but it transpired that all hope was not lost. Turning the incubator straight back on, it had reached almost 37.7 degrees in just under an hour. The following morning, the eggs started to chip.

It seems that unhatched chicks can deal with drops in temperature the closer they get to hatching. If the same accident had happened in the first week of the incubation, things would have been dismally different. As it was, just two chicks died when the incubator went off, and six out of twelve hatched the following evening. Two eggs were infertile and two others had died early on in the process, so we decided that the success rate wasn't all that bad, accidents aside.

The little birds are now making merry, and are growing at an incredible rate. They are supposed to be fully grown at six weeks, and it's not hard to see that happening...

A Hovabator holding a dozen quail eggs somewhere between 37 and 38 degrees centigrade

After the loss of our quail a fortnight ago, the wheels are already in motion to produce some replacement birds. We found a source of tuxedo coturnix quail eggs and bought a dozen for around eight pounds - a reasonable price for fancy marked birds like tuxedos. We chose a hovabator incubator for this job, and in order to keep it simple, we decided to manually turn the eggs. 

After the incubator had been in situ for twenty four hours and had settled somewhere around the ideal 37.5 deg. C. temperature, we marked the eggs with a pencil so that we could keep track on how they were being turned and started the ball rolling. Usual incubation times for coturnix quail eggs are surprisingly short - somewhere in the region of eighteen days from start to finish. Provided that the hovabator keeps on a steady course, we should be looking at a brood of chicks at the start of April.

Hovabator incubators are great for a variety of small scale incubation projects, and they can even take up to sixty large hen eggs when the occasion calls for it. This demonstration model is going to see a great deal of action this spring, so it's a good idea to learn how it works before and get used to using it before the next batch of eggs arrives.

A light sussex x silkie bantam, one of the best cross breed bantams for incubating and brooding young birds.

Given the frustrating nature of our recent disastrous incubation experiment, we have been looking at natural incubators over the last few days. It's easy to get so involved with the technical details of incubation that you lose sight of the fact that this process takes place under every female bird every spring. Electric incubators include insulation foam, heating elements and water reservoirs, but the same equipment (or an equivalent) can be found in the design of all birds.

Despite massive advances in modern incubator technology, the best way to incubate eggs will always be under a hen. Obviously, this is not suitable for for large scale incubation projects, and there are times when keeping hens for the purpose of hatching and caring for young birds is not really practical, but the smallholder with a clutch of eggs stands to learn as much by putting them under a bird as they would by placing them in an incubator. 

Of all poultry species, bantams are know to be the best for hatching and rearing chicks. They are determined sitters, and they are prepared to defend their brood with a courage that is quite out of proportion to their size. Light sussex x silkie bantams are known to be the best of the best, and these sedate little birds are actually quite widespread across the country, where they are used specifically for incubation purposes. 

Their own eggs are rather small, but give them something useful to sit on and they will show themselves to be reliable little broodie hens. Having bought two from a local breeder, we're all now looking forward to the spring, when these pullets will start to come into their own.

A well developed pheasant chick, which died in the incubator as the result of a last minute power failure.

After having painstakingly set up the incubators almost three weeks ago, we were upset to find that a power cut took place over the weekend. Incubators are fragile and delicate pieces of equipment at the best of times, but with no warmth or movement for what might have been two days, all of the embryos appear to have died just a few days before they were due to hatch. Rather than sitting at between 37 and 38 degrees centigrade, the thermometers showed signs that the inside of the incubators were just as cool as the outside, and it could be that they had been in that state for some time.

Conducting a post mortem on the eggs revealed that they had been approaching their hatch date successfully, with the exception of the damaged peacock egg which had done little more than develop a rather nasty smell. It is extremely disappointing to have missed out on the chance to keep turkeys, guineafowl and peacocks, but risk and uncertainty is part of the very nature of incubation.

We may well have counted our chickens before they hatched, but this unavoidable last minute spanner in the works has not put us off. There is a chance that we will have access to some quail eggs in the next few weeks, and it is still not too late to carry out a second batch of test eggs before the autumn sets in.

Guineafowl eggs are so thick and unusual that an unclear reading after five days of incubation is not a cause for concern.

After five days in the incubator, it's about time we scanned the turkey, guineafowl and peacock eggs to find out what is going on inside the shells. It's easy to scan eggs with a candling torch, and with a little bit of practice, you quickly learn what to look for when the light makes the inside of the egg glow up. We recently scanned pheasant eggs after four days and saw clear signs of progress and development in all of the fertile eggs. A distinct dark blob seemed to sit at the centre of a complicated network of blood vessels inside the shell, and during the course of several days, these blood vessels expanded.

We made a video of candling these eggs, which you can find by clicking Here. 

While candling eggs reveals the progress of the embryos in all its fascinating complexity, it also shows which eggs are infertile and which are doomed to be nothing more than smelly timebombs.

With high hopes, we began to scan the turkey and guineafowl eggs, peering through the shells in the hope of spotting telltale signs of life. One of the most immediate and obvious things we noticed when candling the eggs was that there is huge variation between different eggs, not only between the species but also between individuals.

The faint mottling on the turkey eggs was different on every single egg we looked at, and some shells were far thicker than others. Sometimes, the mottling was so irregular that it was impossible to tell if there was anything inside the eggs, and so out of a possible half dozen turkey eggs we scanned, we could only be sure of progress with one. Scanning eggs on day five can give you an idea of what might happen in the future, but it's not a reliable way of "counting your chickens", and we hope to have a few more chicks when they hatch at the beginning of August.

The guineafowl eggs were even more extravagantly marked than the turkey eggs, and we were worried to see a number of cracks in their shells. Living as they do in the dusty, arid regions of sub-saharan Africa, guineafowl lay eggs with shells that are hard and rough, and this is possibly to reduce the risk of water loss on a hot day in the bush. Run your thumb over a guineafowl egg and you'll feel an almost porous surface which you can imagine would soak up rainfall or dew like blotting paper. Guineafowl eggs are really unusual, and they are also known to be very brittle and thick, so it could be that the cracks are less a sign of damage and more an indication that all is well.

When we came to scan the cracked peacock egg, we saw no signs of progress whatsoever. The candling torch showed how some mud and dirt had got caught under the edge of the crack, which may prove to be fatal for the embryo's development. However, there is still a chance that it could start to develop over the next few days, and after such a short time in the incubator, it would be silly to give up on it now. We'll scan it again in a few days, when progress (or a lack of it) in all the eggs will be more obvious.

Our new incubator project will use peacock eggs (left), turkey eggs (centre), and guineafowl eggs (right)

We've been looking for an opportunity to test some new incubators for some time now, so when our sales clerk Kaye went to the poultry and egg auction at Lanark last week, we were looking forward to finding out what she was going to bring back. She did not disappoint, and we found ourselves looking at six guineafowl eggs, six turkey eggs and three peacock eggs on monday morning. Having found homes for any chicks that we might hatch, we set up three different incubators and allowed them to settle to the correct temperatures.

Incubators need to create and sustain constant, even conditions, and temperature and humidity are the key to any successful hatch. It takes many incubators a few hours to reach an appropriate temperature, so letting them settle in before adding the eggs can be very important. Humidity is a real variable in the incubation process, and many areas of Britain differ in their general atmospheric conditions. Some people can artificially incubate eggs without any water while others need to keep reservoirs constantly filled. It's a good idea to have water in all incubators, but it is worth remembering that conditions often change from place to place.

A Gaun manual incubator (left), a Maino automatic incubator (centre) and a Fiem automatic (right).

We're using Fiem, Gaun and Maino incubators for this project. The Fiem and Maino incubators are both fully automatic, so once the eggs are in, they won't need to be touched or fiddled with until they hatch. The Gaun incubator is manually operated, meaning that the eggs need to be turned by hand at least once a day. This will simulate the natural movements of the mother bird, preventing the developing embryo from getting stuck to the side of the shell. 

The Gaun incubator appears to regulate its own temperature by switching a lightbulb on and off periodically. The plastic case is lined with expanded polystyrene for extra insulation, but the small interior made it perfect for trying one of the peacock eggs which had been damaged in transit. The egg has a slightly crushed shell, and it will be interesting to see whether or not anything comes of it. In theory, the crack should cause no trouble provided that the inner membrane has not been torn or damaged, but we will candle it in a few days to see whether or not it is a going concern.

 A close up of the damaged peacock egg. It could be that this egg will never hatch, but we will soon find out.

We will be following the progress of these eggs over the next three weeks as they go through the incubation process. It doesn't matter how many times you incubate eggs, there is always a bit of excitement when they first go into the incubator. Fingers crossed that we should start to see some progress over the next few days...