*sigh*

I’m at a loss. I don’t think any of the eggs are gonna hatch.

We moved Summer into the main part of the coop in preparation for hatching (which could happen any time in the next 2 days).

I took the opportunity to candle the eggs again since we got her off them to clean her box (tried getting her to sit on them in the bucket, but she wasn’t having any of that.)

All of them have air sacks that are much too large for this stage of development. In one (top left in the collage below), you can see feathers that have developed, but again, there’s too much space in there. The chicks should be large enough to pretty much take up the entire egg by now.

We’re all sad that it looks like we won’t be getting any chicks.

I just don’t know why this happened. Summer was a great brooder. She was always on those eggs. Did they get too hot? Did she jostle them too much? Is there something wrong in the genetics?

The last time we got a hen to sit for the duration, only 2 out of 7 eggs hatched. And out of the 5 that were left over, 4 of then were fully formed chicks that died just before hatching. (One had never fully developed.)

So I just don’t know. Is it something we are doing wrong, or is it just nature and out of our control?

One day we’d like to be able to reliably hatch our own eggs, and maybe even sell hatching eggs. But if we can’t get them to hatch, then that’s an issue.

For now, I’ll leave them under her. A couple of them I’m sure are not viable, but there’s that one with the feathers that I’m not ready to give up on. There’s a part of me that keeps saying that chicks grow a lot in the last day or two before hatching. I have a feeling it’s not gonna hatch, but I won’t give up all hope till all hope is gone.