There’s More To Eggs Than Meets The Eye

Do you handle eggs or not? The short answer is “No” – unless circumstances dictate otherwise.

As you will have no doubt read in The Challenge, the egg shell itself is porous – unbelievably so when magnified.

The reason is that it allows the oxygen to be admitted and the poisonous carbon dioxide to escape. However, it also allows surface bacteria to enter and be one of the reasons that an egg becomes contaminated and the embryo dies. Such an egg is now termed “addled”.

Several possibilities arise if you do not use egg handling tweezers. Your fingers, and indeed your hands, are one of the most contaminated bacterial surfaces of the body (and the mouth incidentally). By using your fingers to shift eggs, such bacteria is deposited on the egg surfaces and addled eggs result.

Just pause for a moment and think how long a surgeon spends “scrubbing up” his hands before he fits his surgical gloves – just in case a glove splits anywhere!

Marking Eggs

This is really unnecessary unless you have to transfer one or more to another nest. Left alone is the best practice and gives the greatest chance of plenty of chicks.

I keep a very soft “3B” grade pencil for just that purpose. I do not use any form of marker pen these days, since all markers contain chemicals that can contaminate the growing embryo.

Transferring Eggs

All budgerigars lay on alternate days, as is well known. It naturally follows that the embryos are all growing at different stages in any full clutch.

The beginner breeder doesn’t always think about that and, when forced to transfer to another nest, picks them up, holds all of them in the palm of his/her hand (where they roll around in the bacteria) and, having cleared out another nest of infertile eggs elsewhere, places them in the fostering nest without cross checking the start laying dates of both nests involved.

Surprise, surprise, they addle or are dead-in-shell eventually.

The beginner breeder concludes that the foster hen has incubated at a different temperature – not necessarily true. It is the breeder’s fault, not the foster hen’s!

Different Ages

Our beginner breeder has also made another vital error even though he/she knows full well that all incubating eggs are turned at intervals by all breeding hens.

Under the primary hen, she will have carefully turned them. Instead of just marking her eggs before touching them with a dot on the visible top surface, so he/she knows to transfer the eggs accurately, the breeder doesn’t do that – but carries on. Result – the eggs do not hatch.

The reason? Well, the reason is that within each egg are gelatinous strands that support the growing embryo from dropping down, under gravity, and touching any point on the shell. They are called the chalazae strands.

The hen rotates the eggs to stop the embryos effectively getting cramped and dying. One wonders how many eggs die off in concaves that do not have a layer of suitable sawdust on them or silver sand, as Reinhard Molkentin in South Africa uses. Concaves emerged from somebody historically who thought they were a good idea. OK if shallow, but not if deep with sharp sides.

Location, Location

Be observant! In a clutch of say 5 eggs or more, look carefully at them before you move them for any reason.

You will see that the older, more advanced eggs are on the outer “circle” and the less well developed within that circle. This is because our hens instinctively know that the older eggs require more oxygenated air for their fast growing embryos. While sitting, the hens raise their feathers and allow air to get to those eggs easily. One of nature’s wonders!

Of course if you have to shift them, make certain that they are located exactly as before, and in the process increase your results for your annual target. Haven’t got an annual target? Well think about it.

End of Subject?

Having written all these thoughts for your management in the birdroom, let me conclude by contradicting myself to a degree.

Why is it that those eggs covered in excreta (and sometimes scattered by crazy hens) still hatch?

If I knew that mystery, it would add to my ever increasing knowledge in this difficult hobby we enjoy.

We are always learning.