Getting ready to begin a hatch, any advice?: Shipped Eggs, High Elevation, Silkies, Incuview

[Little Coop on Salt Creek]

Hi everyone!

I'm looking for advice, mostly to calm my nerves, lol!

I'm getting ready to have Silkie eggs shipped to me for hatching. They were laid in CA and are being shipped to Southwest CO, our elevation is approx 6,600 ft. We will be using 2 Incuview with Humidistat incubators. The room where the incubators will be stays in the 60's.. we've got a small heater that I will use to make sure the temp stays within a small window of variation. The house in general doesn't have much humidity.. mostly we sit at under 25% unless it's getting ready to rain or snow. The last time I hatched eggs that weren't local, I gave them to a broody and she only had a 50% success rate, then 2 of them died before a week..so, I'm nervous!

Since switching to the Incuview incubators though we've had 80-90% hatch rates when hatching our own eggs.

I mostly want to make sure that if I need to do specific handling, that I'm aware before hand. Since reading up here on hatching my own eggs, I go as far as weighing them at candling time, so I make sure that they've got the correct amount of humidity come hatch day.

Thanks everyone, I just this site!

 

[ChickenCanoe]

Lots of people will have advice for shipped eggs. I'll try to help with the elevation issue.
Part of the answer will depend on the elevation where the eggs were laid/shipped from.
I'm assuming it wasn't at 6,000 feet.
Humidity and oxygen are your biggest issues.
At your altitude, gasses migrate across an egg shell 27% faster than at sea level. So your primary concern is to prevent too much moisture from being lost in the eggs. One way to do that is to place the incubators in a smaller room or closet where you can place a humidifier. You still have an oxygen issue. One way to solve that is with an oxygen concentrator like inogen. That may not be cost effective so you should expect some losses during incubation.

 

[ChickenCanoe]

I wanted to add that some birds of various species produce and hatch eggs at high altitude. The thought being that they compensate by producing shells that are less porous. You can help by buying eggs that were produced at high elevation.
Given all this information, my suggestion is to use a scale rather than a hygrometer to ascertain the ideal humidity. There are many inexpensive pocket gram scales. Make sure the one you get is repeatable.

 

[Little Coop on Salt Creek]

Lots of people will have advice for shipped eggs. I'll try to help with the elevation issue.
Part of the answer will depend on the elevation where the eggs were laid/shipped from.
I'm assuming it wasn't at 6,000 feet.
Humidity and oxygen are your biggest issues.
At your altitude, gasses migrate across an egg shell 27% faster than at sea level. So your primary concern is to prevent too much moisture from being lost in the eggs. One way to do that is to place the incubators in a smaller room or closet where you can place a humidifier. You still have an oxygen issue. One way to solve that is with an oxygen concentrator like inogen. That may not be cost effective so you should expect some losses during incubation.

I think her elevation is less than 200ft .. yikes!

 

[Little Coop on Salt Creek]

Lots of people will have advice for shipped eggs. I'll try to help with the elevation issue.
Part of the answer will depend on the elevation where the eggs were laid/shipped from.
I'm assuming it wasn't at 6,000 feet.
Humidity and oxygen are your biggest issues.
At your altitude, gasses migrate across an egg shell 27% faster than at sea level. So your primary concern is to prevent too much moisture from being lost in the eggs. One way to do that is to place the incubators in a smaller room or closet where you can place a humidifier. You still have an oxygen issue. One way to solve that is with an oxygen concentrator like inogen. That may not be cost effective so you should expect some losses during incubation.

Thank you! That is the main reason for my choice of incubator I really like the humidistat that I can keep in a range for the humidity... it really seems like from this, that I'm on target with keeping an eye on making sure the eggs are right in the sweet spot of not loosing too much moisture.