We're hatching EMU EGGS!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWKT6-UvD1U

We are so excited to be trying to hatch emu eggs here on Old Redding Farm! A few fun facts about emus to start: Emus are amongst the biggest birds on the planet weighing in between 66 and 100 LBS! They can stand between 5.2 to 6.2 tall and live between 10 and 20 years in the wild! They are flightless birds found primarily in Australia. We want to have emus on the farm largely because we think they are so cool, but also because we plan to sell their eggs. Some people do eat emu meat but we will not be doing that. 

We are new to Emus so when hatching their eggs we are going to do the very best we possibly can! Emu eggs can be a little tricky to hatch because their incubation is so long. We bought a brand new (really large) incubator which should hold their temperature very steady at 97.5 degrees. When hatching eggs is very important to keep the humidity at a level that will help the eggs to lose the right amount of weight each week. Sometimes this humidity level will need to be adjusted each week but typically the humidity should be between 24-35%. 

With smaller eggs like chicken, duck or quail the best way to monitor their progress is through candling. After a week of incubating a chicken or duck egg you can shine a flash light though one end of the egg and see right through the shell and take a look at what’s happening inside. An egg that is fertilized after a week of incubation will have veins visible through the shell and sometimes you can even see the baby chicken moving around inside the shell. However, Emu eggs are MUCH thicker and so much darker, so there is not a light available that shines bright enough to see through the shell.  So instead of just looking through the shell to see how it’s going in there, the way you know how its going for the developing emu is by monitoring their weight loss. 

Ideally over the course of the entire incubation (50 days) emu eggs will lose 15% of their total weight. To monitor their progress we are going to weigh them once per week. We have all their initial weights, so we calculated what 15% weight loss would be in total Grams for each egg. Then we divided that number by 50 to find what weight should be lost each day, and then we took that number and multiplied it by 7 to get a weekly goal for each egg’s weight loss! I know that sounds complicated so here is a chart that shows all of that information for each one of our eggs. 

Initial weight day 0 Weight after 7 days Weight lost in G  Goal weight loss  Over/under report  Egg number 1  568.6 G 555.9 G 12.7 G 12.18 -.52 Egg number 2 596.8 G 582.2 G 14.6 G 12.53 -2.07 Egg number 3 599.9 G 585.5 G 14.4 G 12.6 -1.8  Egg number 4 595.5 G 581.5 G 14 G 12.51 -1.49 Egg number 5 538.8 G 526.7 G 12.1 G 11.31 -.79

Looking at the above chart, each of our eggs lost more than their target amount of weight, which means that our humidity is not high enough. For the first week we were aiming to keep the humidity within that target humidity level of 24-35%. Now we will raise it slightly to try to help them to hang on to more of their moisture. Keeping the humidity steady has been challenging, dialing in how much water to add and how often to add it. Sometimes at night we would check the humidity and all would be okay but by morning it would be much lower than our target so we just need to do our best to keep it from dropping which we suspect is the cause of the higher than targeted weight loss. 

This is our one week update of how hatching emu eggs is going for us, and we will check back in another week from now to see how our weights are going.