Day 21 of quail hatching...how long?

[ManOverBoard]

I know there's several chains about this, but it's our first quail hatch out, and a lot of resources we've read so far say after 12 hours of inactivity to unplug the incubator and call it done.
We know from here and past experiences that sometimes you need to wait and let them hatch out over a few days time. We're currently on day 4 and have been having an interesting occurrence of quail pipping, cracking shell but not actually breaking the membranes and then making no further progress. One we left alone and after 24 hours opened it a bit to try to get air to the chick, but it was already as loss, we successfully aided as second one 12 hours later and it came out clean but had a strange (not yolk) protrusion and despite it's great initial vigor, it passed away 24 hours later. We had another pip yesterday afternoon and then today 24 hours later it had made no progress. We peeled off the loose shell fragments, and noticed it had not punctured the membrane again, and the membrane looked discolored. The chicks was responding to peeps with peeping and moving around so we peeled back a small opening in the membrane and some blood came out. Concerned we stopped attempting to aid it. Being 4 days in we started to check the other unpipped eggs that weren't moving or peeping. 7 of them were empty, 1 was deceased, and the other had a live moving chick in it although it seemed small we had only opened the air sac side. So we put the two live unhatched chicks back in the incubator.
The question is when is a good time to stop and what's going on with these chicks and there hatching issues. We've only done chickens before this with shells we could candle.
Is there something we could do better next time?
And what of these two live unhatched little ones now?

 

[GodLovesU]

Did the ones that hatched seems to be shrink-wrapped in a membrane? As for the two unhatched babies, I would just leave them be, and check for pips.

 

[ManOverBoard]

Did the ones that hatched seems to be shrink-wrapped in a membrane? As for the two unhatched babies, I would just leave them be, and check for pips.

No, not that I could tell, they came out so clean it was like they popped out of a locket and closed the door behind themselves we had to really look close to tell which eggs they came from.

 

[ManOverBoard]

No, not that I could tell, they came out so clean it was like they popped out of a locket and closed the door behind themselves we had to really look close to tell which eggs they came from.

Thanks for all your input

 

[Susan Skylark]

Coturnix or new world quail? My first batch of coturnix hatched day 19/20 due to a cold incubator, subsequent hatches are consistently day 16. New world quail have a much longer incubation. Shipped eggs? I just tried hatching some shipped eggs from a great breeder, and had similar issues. 40 eggs set, 19 No development or early quitter, of 21 in lockdown 11 hatched into healthy chicks. A couple were late incubation quitters but most of those 10 were weak, underdeveloped, small, little down, dead in shell chicks. I tried helping a couple after several other live but never pipped eggs died, all 3 just died within a day or so, but again weak, little down, couldn’t stay upright. Hopefully it is just bad luck and shipping trauma, don’t give up, quail are a ton of fun (usually!). Genetics or nutrition may also be an issue depending on source.

 

[ManOverBoard]

Coturnix or new world quail? My first batch of coturnix hatched day 19/20 due to a cold incubator, subsequent hatches are consistently day 16. New world quail have a much longer incubation. Shipped eggs? I just tried hatching some shipped eggs from a great breeder, and had similar issues. 40 eggs set, 19 No development or early quitter, of 21 in lockdown 11 hatched into healthy chicks. A couple were late incubation quitters but most of those 10 were weak, underdeveloped, small, little down, dead in shell chicks. I tried helping a couple after several other live but never pipped eggs died, all 3 just died within a day or so, but again weak, little down, couldn’t stay upright. Hopefully it is just bad luck and shipping trauma, don’t give up, quail are a ton of fun (usually!). Genetics or nutrition may also be an issue depending on source.

Supposedly rare varieties of cotournix quail. From a highly recommended person on Etsy.
We've got 14 live healthy chicks. We are now five days into hatching and still have two in the incubator. Much like yours, some just seem week/slow and small. We had one just come out finally after 48 hours of assisted hatching. Its feet were over it's head, one toe was malformed backwards and it seemed so small it was desperate to get out and peeped loudly and seemed so relieved when it finally did, but then couldn't stay upright seemed like it was seizing a bit then passed away minutes after. The other two still in the incubator are still absorbing yolks even though they were all set on the same day. We want to breed the quail for meat and eggs so I'm hoping we can figure this out because I don't know about going through this every hatch.

 

[ManOverBoard]

Supposedly rare varieties of cotournix quail. From a highly recommended person on Etsy.
We've got 14 live healthy chicks. We are now five days into hatching and still have two in the incubator. Much like yours, some just seem week/slow and small. We had one just come out finally after 48 hours of assisted hatching. Its feet were over it's head, one toe was malformed backwards and it seemed so small it was desperate to get out and peeped loudly and seemed so relieved when it finally did, but then couldn't stay upright seemed like it was seizing a bit then passed away minutes after. The other two still in the incubator are still absorbing yolks even though they were all set on the same day. We want to breed the quail for meat and eggs so I'm hoping we can figure this out because I don't know about going through this every hatch.

We set 30 eggs, 7 were empty, 14 hatched healthy, 2 died shortly after hatching, 5 were late quitters and 2 are still working on coming out.

 

[ManOverBoard]

Update on the quail. 6 days of hatching. I assisted the last two out. They were so tired. A couple of rounds of honey water to get some electrolytes into them. A lot of love and an overnight in the incubator and they were gaining strength and super clingy to me trying by any means to get close every time I checked on them. Sadly they died later this morning when I moved them to the brooder.

So we've totaled 14 live quail. I'm hoping to make a post with pics to get an idea of what we ended up with.