Murphy's Laws of the Hatch
By Inga Ladd
article © 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
