Our incubation methods

Incubation:

The incubation process of peafowl can be very demanding and even more challenging when dealing with green peafowl. Green peafowl are notoriously sensitive from hatch through the first 6 months of age and here at Bob’s we believe confidence in your method is key for any successful operation. 

Here are some of the methods we use for incubating and hatching green peafowl, for starters we set all green peafowl eggs under surrogates, in this case we use gamefowl hens that we breed and maintain here. Gamefowl still maintain the broody instinct whereas the egg layer or meat breeds have had the broodiness behavior tapered down genetically by careful breeding. This does not mean a Rhode Island Red won’t go broody as many hens will under the right conditions. What you need to understand is the instinct is likely still somewhat strong to get her to start setting on eggs but the issue is loyalty to the nest. Consider this, a gamefowl hen will set, protect and keep setting until the eggs hatch, this means you can pull the eggs and set several clutches under the same hen and she will remain loyal to the nest. A good game hen will set until she withers away and dies on the nest so we must manage and rotate our setters for health reasons. Getting back to the Rhode Island Red setting issue, from my experiences, birds like these will set but, they are always hungry and approximately mid way through the set, they will sometimes stay off the nest longer to feed and some might take all day only to return to the nest at night to sleep. There are always exceptions and experimenting for what works for you is important. 

We usually expect our greens to begin laying around mid to late February so we start up 40-50 game hens setting in early February. The goal is to start and finish every peafowl egg under a game hen but we sometimes get overloaded with eggs and we must move many to our incubators and hatchers. We leave the pea eggs under game hens for a minimum of 15 days, no less.

Our Machines:

When I was a young boy growing up in Alabama, I remember getting my very first incubator for Christmas it was a styrofoam type and I was ecstatic to say the least. Years later, my dad was surprised I was still interested in birds so he bought me a well used Leahy Favorite 416 redwood that still purred like a cat. Using that redwood seemed to make things easier, temps stayed solid and humidity was never an issue. As I grew older I tried the several modern machines that are available today and I was disappointed in the performance standard as our hatch rate seemed to plummet, so several years ago I went on a search for the absolute best redwood incubator ever made and in my opinion, the Petersime rotary incubators, models 1-5 have been the absolute best we have used. My choice for hatcher, the Humidaire Model D Hatcher controlled by a custom digital thermostat. These relics are solid machines and very hard to find these days but are very worth the search. We maintain several here on site and they still run like new. 

Gerald Barker