Incubating geese eggs help!

[Anonymous]

We are going to be incubating 6 Dewlap Toulouse Geese eggs again, we have recently incubated 6 of these Dewlap Toulouse and 8 Embden of two bloodlines. Out of the 14 eggs we had only 3 hatch and these hatched early, the Dewlap Toulouse has turned out to be a Toulouse X Embden and we had 2 Embden hatch.
The eggs that were not infertile all had chicks at various stages of development dead in the shell.

The incubator we use is a R-Com. it has auto turning via the tray at the bottom sliding from each side. We set the temperature at 37.7 then down to 37.2 and the humidity was set at 50% up to 62%. The eggs were turned every hour. Some of the eggs were turned manually 3 times a day as they were not turning but all the others were turning.

Is there something we are doing wrong? Are the temperature and humidity correct? Should we be cooling the eggs for 15minms a day and then spritzing with water before placing the lid back on the incubator?

I really don't want to end up with a low hatch rate again.

 

[Davidd]

Hello, and welcome to the forum
With dewlap toulouse you will not have a good hatch rate- they are very hard to hatch in an incubator- I have R-coms and Polyhatch and incubate lots of Toulouse eggs- The polyhatch is better than the R-com (still air as opposed to fan) but you will never get a high percentage hatch rate from most incubators with Dewlap toulouse- i find the best incubators either muskovies or broody hens ( i use both) Embdens are a bit easier to hatch in incubators. I would set the temp at 37.5 humidity 45% then once pipping up humidity to as high as you can 70% in thr r-com and 80% in the polyhatch. Cooling, i find, has no effect as does spraying with water- the increase in humidity does not last long. This year, i have at the moment 10 goslings and another 40 set- if i get 15-20 from those 40 i will be very happy. You will get a lot of DIS (dead in shell)
with toulouse- they get to just before pipping and die This year seems better than last - i know some of the top breeders only got one or two goslings the whole of last year.Sorry to sound so negative but that's why Giant dewlap Toulouse are so expensive
regards, David

 

[Anonymous]

Hi David.

So do you think us setting the humidity to 50% straight away may have also had adverse reactions to the chicks? Also is it 30days they should be incubated for with them being turned for 27? As ours did hatch 3 days earlier than they should have which confused us a lot :?

Thanks.

 

[Davidd]

5% humidity will not make that much difference- better to do it buy weight if you can- they should lose 13% up to pipping. Most do take 30 days but they can start to pip on day 27- they are not like chickens- you need to be patient- they can take 3 days from pipping to hatching,
regards, David

 

[Anonymous]

The best way to check if your eggs have lost the 13 - 14% weight is to weigh the egg before you put it into the incubator ( you will need accurate digital scales for this. ) and continue to weigh the egg to check that it is achieving the correct weight loss. You should chart the weight loss and try to aim to have achieved the loss in the first two weeks that the egg is in the incubator. It is important to do it early in the first couple of weeks because eggs after this time don't tend to lose enough weight. (I have been doing this following the advice given on "Egg Incubation" which was a DVD made by Birdworld. I bought it really cheaply on ebay and have found it to be really helpful.)