My first Quail. A mini blog.

[pac]

I candled this morning, but I'm going to go into lockdown tomorrow. Which will be a full 14 days.

Now that I've got that bad batch under my belt I can definitely see the shadow I am looking for and not just runny egg. Very dark, pronounced lines.

I've got 14 eggs that went back into the incubator. With a couple that were suspect. The shadow was dark, but only filled half the egg. And you could see it easily from one side, but not so much when you turned the egg.

Not near as many eggs that lit up light a light bulb, just runny like I said. Which were the ones I kept last time.

Here's hoping for a good hatch out of the eggs that survived USPS.

 

[gummylick]

Hey @pac, I've been following along as we're very close on our adventure! I already have my setup and am on my first/second hatching as first was a bit of a failure. I have a small crew in brooder and hoping to get a larger crew for my top floor out of incubator.

I have a top and bottom floor like you and the bottom floor, I have wire and a tray, but I've been thinking about the cleaning routine on the top floor and noticed you're approaching that now.

Currently, I put some shelf liner on the wood and a wire floor/frame that I can lift. I'm thinking put the wood pellet bedding over the wire and then lift floor and wipe/dump out as needed.

In my cubby, I went with pine shavings.

On yours are you gonna pile just move shavings on top and then eventually just wipe/dump all? Building toward a deep layer system? What's the cleaning plan?

 

[pac]

In my enclosed area I was just going to shovel/scrape the shavings out. Then put down fresh. It worked well when I had chickens, but they did more of their poopin' when they roosted. And I had a droppings pit under their roost. I've got a plastic kid's snow shovel I use.

I want the birds to be able to hunker down into the shavings if they feel cold.
That's what my single bird was doing this morning in her brooder. I opened the window in that room so it would cool down at night and the Govee read 64F this morning. She was nestled down into the chips when I looked in on her, but got up and started moving around when I was candling eggs.

I was just thinking yesterday that I don't want the shavings too deep and fluffy. I was thinking it might be too easy to lose an egg that way.

I'll know more once I get going.

What is that wood slat, round, log looking thing in your second pic? Can those be bought? Nice looking hiding place.

 

[gummylick]

The wood slat thing is actually a "wood reptile bridge" and can be found on Amazon. It's rolled there, but I've unwrapped it to form cave at times for the ones below. They didn't take much interest at first so I've been rolling it and then stuff it with greens/treats so they gotta work at it.

So, in my cubby (side closed area), I have pine shavings and I missed the first egg for the exact same reason you mentioned - it was buried deep into the shavings. I've lowered the depth of shavings since and its a bit easier to find the eggs now.

 

[pac]

Man, there are all kinds of wood bridges there.

Thanks.

I'd like to keep things a little interesting for them and I really like the way those look.

 

[pac]

I went into lockdown this afternoon.
I thought I added an extra day to my incubator's day timer, but the egg turner turned off. So I went ahead and filled up the second reservoir and took out the turning plate.