This year’s guinea keet hatches were especially successful, so I’m going to record it on my blog, so I can find it next year. Right now, my notes are scribbled on a scrap of card stock!

I’ll write down more details later, in regards to the incubator we have, and how we manage to hatch so many live keets and keep them alive. But, for today, because I am preparing for a road trip and have a jacket I want to sew and a studio to tidy up, here is my schedule.

The day before loading the incubator, make sure it’s clean, has a stable surface to sit on where you will check it regularly, turn it on and get it to the appropriate humidity.

Day 1 - When incubator is ready, set the eggs in. Our incubator has a simple, but effective, automatic turner and I highly recommend that. I try to keep the humidity around 35-45% from days 1-23 and the temperature at 37.2C. My little humidistat is in Celsius.

Day 23 - Stop the egg turner and increase humidity to 70% or over and increase the heat to 37.5C.

Those are the 2 most important dates. I didn’t know to turn the egg turner off the first time, and 4 of the keets ended up with splayed legs from jumping over the frame that turns the eggs.

A couple of other important modifications that I made. I cut a shelf liner to fit and on the day I stopped turning the eggs, I carefully put that liner under the eggs before leaving them alone. I worked quickly and carefully and then upped the humidity right away.

Day 25 is when my guinea keets almost always start hatching and I’ve had hatches go as long as day 31.

Questions for me? Leave them in the comments!

Anne Dovel