Membrane stuck to down in unborn chick

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chickenfan

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The Faverolles bantams are born with a very long, fine down. I have a chick which has got half way around the egg and no further. The membrane has shrunk away from the shell and is sticking firmly to the chick down so it is impossible for the chick to hatch. Any suggestions? I've moistened the tough white skin in the hope that it will gradually unstick from the soft down? The chick is strong.
 
Thank you Chris. Its still not quite out of the egg and I think there is some yolk/yellow fluid on it but it is cheeping loudly
 
The chick is crying pathetically. It is almost out of the shell and has a foot on the edge. It wants to live so much but I'm just not sure its long down is not still attached somewhere. Should I take all the loose shell off?
 
I've pulled all the shell off so the chick has 'hatched'. There didn't seem any way of letting it finish the hatching naturally with membrane stuck to it everywhere. It is very wet and sticky, perhaps from all my membrane moistening, or perhaps it was always too moist. The head is rather bent over, perhaps from it not having made the effort to hatch.
 
Looking much more like a chick now, although one wing which was stuck to the membrane is a bit displaced
 
Thank you so much Marigold. After such an unpromising beginning the chick looks fairly normal today, though still needs time to fluff up its long down.
 
Forgot to say its an extraordinarily vigorous bunch of chicks. No resting after hatching and all running around and busy eating, and they look like little angels in their long yellow down.
 
I've double-checked the humidity and temperature of my R-com 20 incubator. It is running at too high humidity. It ran at 55% instead of 45% and I had them hatching at 82% instead of 65% humidity. So I'm even more puzzled why the membrane dried out and shrank over some of the chicks. The temperature was also too low: 37.1 instead of 37.5. I've just had it serviced with new parts and was told it was 'spot on', so I didn't think to check before the incubation.
 
We have an R-com20 Chickenfan. The temperature reading is only at the position of the sensor at the top. The lack of insulation at the sides means we need to run the whole thing in a box to get the temperature even throughout. Running low temp just delays the hatch a bit, which in our case was up to three days because the ambient temperature was too low. Since the turning motor failed we use it only as a hatcher and surround it in bubble wrap.

We are running our incubation machines dry at the moment because the ambient humidity is too high and the air sacs are not forming correctly. If the air sac isn't big enough the chick won't have room to manoeuvre and will fail to pip. So perhaps that's what happened? Brinsea do a free incubation guide with a diagram of the air sac formation, or you can work on the weight loss -that's a lot of extra handling with the potential to contaminate the eggs though.
 
Thankyou very much for your thoughts Chris. So you put your R-com 20 in a box of polystyrene chips If the chicks didn't have enough room to manoeuvre this would account for the chick that pipped lengthways along one side of the egg. But I'm still not quite sure why 3 others had tough white skin shrunk around them. Perhaps if they weren't in quite the right position the pipping was just too slow? I will try to just use broody hens in future. Too many things can go wrong with incubators.
 
Things can go just as wrong with broodies Chickenfan -one of ours ate the chicks as they hatched! Then a broody took ill 3 days in and died. Another broody took ill as well and died eventually. We only use incubators now.

Think your problem may be too small an air sac caused by too high humidity, as it sounds like you were not observing the sac formation and comparing it to a published chart
 
Thanks Chris. I'll look at that chart, though I still find candling difficult and have bad eyesight
 
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