Candling with an Ova Scope

 

by Kimberly Furry

The Brinsea Ova Scope came a couple of weeks ago! We opened it up, followed the supplied directions and checked out our eggs that very day.

I'm a little worried now. Out of our 12 eggs, I can definitely see two chicks moving around ... but nothing in the others. They have been incubating for 11 days. Could it really be that only two out of the 12 made it?

The good news is I can see the air sacs in almost all of them. Maybe I'm wrong about the eggs, so I will persevere by keeping them in the incubator. I may have a mess on my hands if one or two explode, but I hope that won't happen and we'll get more than two chicks.

I found a very useful site that provides videos and pictures of candling chicken eggs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It's perfectly all right to take the eggs out of the incubator, but not usually longer than 30 minutes. Make sure your hands are clean when handling them. You don't want to clog the pores in the egg shell.

The girls thoroughly enjoyed seeing the chicks moving around in the egg! They kept vying for a turn. Over and over again they peeked inside the scope to see the chick wiggling around inside its egg. It was pretty neat to see how excited the girls are getting about the chicks.

Egg Perched on the Ova Scope

There were two eggs we threw out after candling because we knew absolutely nothing was going on inside. Also, they both had a slight crack in the side we hadn't noticed before. Derek cracked them open back by our creek and there was no embryo growth in either.

I was also able to plop my camera upon the scope to get a video of the chick moving around in the egg: