[bj_cardiff]

Has anyone had a batch of incubated eggs hatch out and only be one sex? Is it common, rare or just a co-incidence?

Last summer I hatched 6 turkey eggs, 4 of them hatched and have grown into Hens. I put another batch of 12 eggs straight in afterwards but thunder storms during the month meant that hatches locally were poor. Only 3 hatched and all three were stags.

Very odd..

[Marches Farmer]

We generally get around 40% hatch of stags but have larger batches.

[Eve]

Coincidence   

[waddy]

Probably coincidence. We had four stags hatch and nine hens. We lost one batch of eggs due to not enough room in the air space to hatch in spite of running dry until lockdown; but found running a small fan over the incubator solved the problem for the next time.


Helen

[Terry T]

It is possible that your hatching conditions favoured either male or female birds for some reason, with the unhatched eggs containing the opposite sex. There will be sex linked differences...

[bj_cardiff]

That's what I thought, but if those conditions could be replicated, I suspect most commercial breeders would opt for stags rather than hens!

[macgro7]

Actually commercial fatteners prefer hens! And therefore sexed hen ppults are quite a bit more expensive. That's because hens have proportionally more breast meat. Males grow faster and larger but have a bit more narrow chests