In this article I will attempt to impart some
of what I am learning, and yes, after 30 odd years I am still learning.
I will
try not to make it too complicated and to those who are already well versed in
this joyous pastime, I hope I don’t bore you too much.
An egg has to go through
a number of changes before it arrives at the beautiful little chick that you
see peek out from under that prize Parrot or Duck that has pride of place in
your back yard. Right, so what happens? We have, hopefully have a fertile egg. This
is not as easy as it sounds. Not every egg is going to be fertile. Just because
you see your prize Cockatoos mating every day doesn’t necessarily mean that
they are going to produce viable eggs.
But, for the purposes of this article
all the eggs are fertile.
The bird sits on this egg. What happens is the
temperature of Ms Bird raises the temp in the egg to the point where the embryo
‘switches on’ so to speak, and starts its journey on the way to life.
After that
there is a combination of time, temperature, humidity and a number of other
changes that take place which ultimately end up with you looking at hopefully a
healthy baby bird (those of you that have candled a week old egg in the
incubator and have seen the heart beating away will know, an awesome sight).
The temp and humidity must not only be right for each particular species but
must also stay constant. The reason for this is that the growing embryo must
develop at a certain rate to arrive healthy at the appointed hatch day and Ms
Bird has all this preset automatically.
Remember, the egg started off as
Albumen (white), and yolk, with a fertilized embryo in the yolk, and this, over
the incubation period will develop bones, muscle, skin, feathers and all organs
etc. and hatch out on the due date a perfect replica of its parents. And this,
very basically is incubation Mother Nature style.
Artificial incubation on the
other hand injects a wee bit of science into the equation. Of course we humans
know we can do it better, and to a degree we can. We can monitor the eggs we
set and make sure the temp and humidity stay precise and constant. Too many
wide fluctuations can cause twisted legs, bumble-foot, twisted necks and of
course dead in egg chicks. A good example of this is the Ratite family (Emu,
Ostrich and Kiwi), because of their size the eggs can be weighed daily to
monitor whether the embryo is growing properly, and slight adjustments can be
made. If adjustments aren’t made there will be a greater chance for the chicks
to be malformed, and this seems to be more prevalent in the ‘giant’ birds. This
is possibly because of their high growth rate. I have just hatched some Ostrich
chicks. The eggs weighed approx 1.6kg at time of setting and I was able to adjust
conditions to ensure the birds were healthy and fighting fit at hatch time. It
is a bit harder to do this with, say Musk Lorikeet eggs as the cost of a good
set of scales to accurately measure these size eggs could be easily into four
figures, and this is probably more than the average bird keeper is able or
prepared to outlay. But as I have noticed, the smaller species do seem to be a
little bit more forgiving. In saying this, I must point out the equipment that
one incubates these eggs in has to be good quality, because if it is not then
nothing is forgiven. Mother Nature won’t let us get away with too much, and
will let us know very quickly that science has but a minimal role here if we
don’t do the groundwork.
If you are thinking of getting into artificial incubation, I suggest you first do some reading on the subject.
This will give you some idea of how far you want to take things. If you have
one or two pairs of average value birds then maybe it is easier and cheaper to
let nature take its course.
If you do decide to get into things a bit more
seriously then you have to decide whether you are prepared to make the
commitment in time as well as money.
If you want to hatch and hand-raise those
Crimson-Wings and Galahs out the back, hopefully you are not going to go out
and buy that $200 wonder that has been in the local rag for the past month. A
good incubator is not cheap and they will not do everything! What are you going
to do when the power goes out?
Those eggs, depending on the species will be in
the incubator for 18-21 days or more (49-52 for Emus). If you keep pulling eggs
from the nest that unit could be on for a couple of months or more, and yes,
that little man Murphy and his law is out here waiting.
Once the eggs
hatch you are parent no.1 from day no.1. Those of you that have had the
experience of trying to hand feed a 2 hour old Rainbow Lorikeet or Spur-Winged
Plover for the first time will Know what I mean.
Then it’s 2 hourly feeds for
the first week, and then gradually lengthening the gaps from there. But that is
Hand-raising which is another topic altogether. This is what I meant about a
commitment in time.