Should I Help My Chick Hatch?

Very often, if you are a bird breeder, you run into this question time and time again. Should you hatch your chick, or let it die in its egg? Fortunately for us that is a false dichotomy, but we’ll get to that in a second. The answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no.

You see when your chick is too weak to hatch it’s probably to weak to live. Often they have a disability like splayed leg or crook toe, often they have trouble adjusting there lungs to the outside air.

If you are trying to decide what to do, preform the following steps:

1: Is it struggling or are its lungs adjusting?

If it is visibly struggling it might need help, but if its not, hatching it might be fatal, as its lungs are still adjusting. Thus in this case, do not hatch it until the hatching period is over, which brings me to the next point:

2: Is it still within hatching period?

Button quail, to use my favorite bird for an example, have a three day hatching period, meaning at anytime within three days they could hatch, for them, until day three you shouldn’t hatch them.

There are exceptions for that as well. For instance if it is attempting to walk around trying to get ‘unstuck’ from a part that is still stuck to it, or if its head is out and lungs have adjusted etc. but it is still stuck.

3: Is the humidity high enough?

At hatching, every bird should be in an area at between 60-80% depending on the bird. Pheasants do happen to be usually still supposed to be in the 50s. If the humidity is not high enough then the shell will be too hard to hatch it, and the chick also might stick to it.

Thus, before aiding your struggling chick, add water to the environment to make hatching easier (If all other baby birds are out you can even raise it a little extra to soften the shell yet more).

4: If you’re gonna do a job, you’d better do it right

If you do it wrong, the chick will die!

If all requirements are filled and you know you ought to help then do not shake the egg, but gently pry apart the egg from the opening. It may be stuck as a result of dryness or lack of proper turning, or it’s just stuck and it’s not anybody’s fault. Getting the shell off the chick is a hard and delicate task.

If you have to you can leave a small portion stuck to it as, if it has any strength whatsoever, or has other chicks with it, they can probably eat it off. A larger portion may be gently cut off if needed.

Conclusion:

Now with all those steps met I will warn you that if a chick cannot hatch in a proper environment, then it probably won’t live for very long out of its egg either. There are exceptions, some chicks I’ve hatched have lived happily to adulthood, but others have been incurably splay legged.

But I believe that it is worth the chance! So please feel free to give your chick a fair shot at life.

And you have any questions o you think you have anything to add, the comments are below!