Murphy's
Laws of the Hatch
By Inga Ladd
April 11, 2003
Murphy's
Laws of the Hatch includes these (and probably more) maxims:
- The better quality
your flock the less likely you'll be able to hatch as many chicks as you
want.
- The single comb hen
with four toes on one foot and six toes on the other will lay an egg every
day, never molt and never go broody.
Her sister with no crest or foot feathers will find these eggs,
hide them and hatch them all.
- The Best of Breed pullet
with perfect type will never lay.
In fact, she'll probably just drop dead. Her mother will lay two eggs and only two eggs before going
broody. Her father who was fertile
last season will be infertile this season.
- If you raise a
really nice bird, odds are that you lost the notes on which breeding pen
produced it. If you can find the
notes, this will be the pen that the neighbor’s dog managed to kill.
- If you have 6 eggs
in your incubator from a mediocre breeding pen and 6 eggs from your very
best trio, all six of the mediocre ones will hatch. The 6 from the great trio will be
perfectly developed and die in the shell without peeping.
- If you do have a
perfect 100% hatch, someone will put the wrong waterer in the brooder and
half the chicks will drown.
- What worked last
year never seems to work this year.
(People,
did I miss anything?)
I
think Murphy will leave people alone occasionally at the beginning to give them
a false sense of security. Later, the
fancy Sportsman and fancy equipment works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. It is enough to make a normally positive
person like myself get rather gloomy and want to scream and pull my hair
out. Personally, I've had a couple of
bad hatch years in a row and I'm willing to do anything to remedy it and get
those chicks. I want to believe that
science will help because I don't want to let Murphy win.
Brown Egg
Blue Egg