Incubation

(Incubating Pheasant Eggs at Allandoo Pheasantry)

Although the occasional determined hen persuades us to let her incubate a few eggs most of our eggs are artificially incubated using Brinsea's incubators with their humidity management modules. I admit we have not tried others but we have been very pleased and had excellent results with Brinsea machines.

We have a heater on a thermostat in our incubation room which helps keep our small to medium sized incubators stable. This works well for us as we are working with a number of different species of pheasant and we have found that some need a little more humidity than others.

Rob Harvey has written an extremely good book called "Practical Incubation" which is well worth buying. "Pheasants of The World" by Keith Howman is another good book from which we got graphs for charting weight loss of eggs from laying until hatching. This gave us the information needed during incubation. If eggs are not losing enough weight we need to lower the humidity slightly or raise the humidity if they are losing too much weight. This is where the smaller incubators come in handy. We have different humidity settings for each incubator varying from about 28% relative humidity (RH) to about 52% RH.  It is definitely trial and error but hatchability has been very good using graphs to determine humidity.

It is certainly money well spent to buy the best and most precise thermometers, scales etc. you can afford. We have many thermometers accurate to 0.1°C. By having a handful you can check they are working properly if they are all reading the same. The correct temperature is of course the most important factor in the incubation process. Only adjust temperature a little at a time. If your chicks are hatching late then you should raise the temperature. If they are early however the temperature is too high.

We have found that, rather than putting eggs in the hatcher two or three days before hatching, we have better results when the chick has pipped internally (about a day before hatching). This might be because our incubators are not on rollers but only tip slowly from side to side. The chicks seem to manage to position themselves for hatching perfectly well. We put them in a hatcher so we can increase humidity drastically to around 70%RH. We also decrease the temperature to about 37.4°C from 37.8°C. Having the newly hatched chicks separate from the eggs also helps in the control of bacteria. We have had a lot of success but we are always learning. If anyone would like to send us information of their own experiences we would love to hear from you. Please let us know if you would like an article put onto our site. It can be added to "Your Page".