Know your start date and species? Find out exactly when your eggs will hatch. Pick a species and this shows the right temperature and humidity for exactly where you are in the hatch, counts down to lockdown and hatch day, and logs your results afterwards.
Incubation periods and settings checked against multiple poultry extension and hatchery referencesYour incubator can run more than one batch at once, each on its own clock — switch between them here.
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Forced-air incubator settings — still-air incubators typically run about 1–2°F warmer, measured at egg-top level.
If a batch doesn't go the way you hoped, this is usually where the answer is hiding.
This is almost always humidity or ventilation at lockdown, not the chick itself. Low humidity dries out the internal membrane, gluing the chick in place ("shrink-wrapping") so it physically can't rotate to finish hatching. Closing air vents to try to force humidity up is a common but counterproductive fix — it starves the chick of the oxygen it needs most in its final hours, since air exchange demand peaks right before hatch. If you saw a pip with no progress, check humidity first, then make sure vents were open, not closed.
This points to something earlier in the process — often infertility, a temperature spike or dip during early development (days 0–7 are the most fragile), or eggs that were stored too long or too roughly handled before setting. Candling at day 7 and day 14 is the best way to catch this early rather than finding out at hatch day.
The chick is alive and developed but may be malpositioned or struggling with the air cell. Give it time — many chicks rest for 12–24 hours between internal and external pipping, which is completely normal. Resist the urge to open the incubator to check, since that itself can drop humidity sharply and cause the shrink-wrapping problem above.
Too low during lockdown causes shrink-wrapping, as above. Too high can be just as fatal in the other direction: excess fluid inside the egg can cause a chick to effectively drown as it attempts to breathe through the air cell. Neither problem is fixed by guessing — a hygrometer, not a feeling, is what tells you which side of the range you're actually on.
A brief spike can push development too fast, producing a weak chick even if it does hatch. A dip slows things down, sometimes leading to a late, "soft," under-developed hatch. Unlike humidity, temperature needs to be stable throughout the entire incubation, not just adjusted at lockdown — fluctuations of more than about 1°F sustained for any length of time are worth investigating.