If you’ve been waiting for your chicken eggs to hatch you’re probably very excited to meet your chick for the first time. Hatch day can be very exciting and stressful even if everything goes smoothly.
Unfortunately, not every chick will hatch smoothly. If you notice that your chick has pipped but isn’t breaking through, you may become worried, understandably. So what should you do if your egg pipped 24 hours ago with no progress? This article explores this
If your egg pipped 24 hours ago, and is showing no signs of progress, then you may have to help the bird hatch.
Table of Contents
Chick egg pipped 24 hours ago
Pipping takes a lot of energy out of chicks. These birds are quite small and the shell is quite strong and hard to break through.
The first sign of pipping is a good sign, this means that the bird is alive and is ready to come out, but this can take a while. Understanding what’s going on will help you know what to do in this situation:
How long does it take a chick to hatch after pipping?
Different birds take different amounts of time to hatch after they’ve pipped. You can’t rush the bird, it will decide when it’s ready.
Up until now, your chick has been growing doing nothing for the past three weeks. Having to break out of its shell and hatch can be very tiring.
Your chick may need to take breaks in between pipping and hatching, it is common for this process to take 12 to 18 hours and sometimes even longer, up to 24 hours.
A bird may pip a little bit, then stop pipping for a couple of hours, and then pip constantly until it eventually hatches. The time it takes a bird to start pipping for the second time, to when the bird finally hatches, take a few minutes.
When to help the bird:
If the egg does not hatch after 24 hours then you may need to help the bird hatch.
It is recommended that you help the chick hatch when it’s been 24 hours since the last pip. The bird inside the egg may be too exhausted to go on.
If you don’t hear any peeping from inside the egg, and don’t see the bird pipping, then you likely need to help the bird out.
If you initially heard peeping, but the peeping is getting weaker and lower, and if the movement coming from the shell is slowing down and seems weaker, then you likely need to help the bird out
How to help the bird:
Start off by taking the bird out of the incubator and gently, but quickly, peeling the shell in the area where the bird had started to pip.
If there is no blood in the area, and if it’s damp on the inside and not wet, then you can open more of the shell. This help will give the bird a head start and enable it to hatch the rest of the way by itself.
You can also peel some more eggshell off, but do this as quickly as you can, doing this too slowly can cause the membrane to dry out and get stuck on the bird.
You can then put the egg back in the incubator to allow the bird to hatch on its own. The bird will likely still struggle as it hatches but it will be alright. You can encourage it by talking to it while it does this, the chick will respond by kicking and peeping.
Watching videos online explaining how to do this is also recommended.
Conclusion
In conclusion, if an egg has pipped but has not hatched after 24 hours then you may need to help the bird come out of the egg following the steps listed above. Talking to eggs as a way of encouragement also helps chicks hatch
If you enjoyed this article then you may also be interested in other chicken related articles. Here are some articles that you may be interested in: Chicken Eggs Not Hatching After 24 Days, Chicken Laying On Side, Can’t Walk, Baby Chick Not Growing?