Although the occasional determined hen persuades us to let her incubate a few eggs most of our eggs are artificially incubated. We have been using Brinsea's incubators with their humidity management modules and the newer King Suro incubators from r-com. We have been very pleased and had excellent results with both makes although we have ended up using the Octagon 40's as hatchers as the temperature differed too much from one area of the incubator to another. The smaller Octagon 20's we have found to be much better.

We have a heater on a thermostat in our incubation room which helps keep our small incubators stable. Having a number of small incubators instead of one large one works well for us as we have many different species of pheasant and have found that some need more humidity than others so we have each incubator at slightly different settings. We will sometimes change eggs during incubation from one incubator to another if they are losing too much or not losing enough weight throughout the gestation period. 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. The humidity in the incubators can vary from as low as 16% relative humidity (RH) to about 55% 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 try and aim for an even temperature of 37.7°C for all pheasant eggs.

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 (usually 24 - 48 hours 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°C - 37.4°C from 37.7°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 Bird Page".