Eggs and Thunderstorms.....

danny boy · **Posted:** Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:12 am

I was told lightning will kill the eggs.
Did a little experiment once & it proved true.

danny boy · **Posted:** Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:13 am

meant to ad.
thunderstorms no, electrical & lightning will.

greenaus · **Posted:** Thu Sep 25, 2008 11:55 am

Agree.

I reckon a direct lightning strike would probably kill me, too, and I'm a bit bigger than the typical egg. ;-)

I'm sorry everyone. I assumed the original question was simply to do with a thunderstorm passing through, not lightning strikes, flooded nests, abandoned nests, etc. I sincerely apologise for my error.

With regards to lightning strikes, I reckon that it could only have an effect if the nest and/or eggs are located such that the electrical energy is able to make it to the egg.

danny boy · **Posted:** Thu Sep 25, 2008 12:11 pm

why be sorry?
It does become confusing!!!!
With electrical storms it holds the charge in the air & around the ground, not exactly sure abot the sciences of it all.
But if we had a broody in a nest box, we would drive a piece of steel into the ground, touching the nest, it acted as an earth.
At the same time as doing this, I had a nest with out the steel spike.
All eggs on this got killed.
I would say with say heaps of water, the eggs would get chilled and probably die. Cant imagine the hen would be to happy about sitting in water either.

greenaus · **Posted:** Thu Sep 25, 2008 12:48 pm

I'll find out this weekend if last Sunday's storm had any affect. All of the Australorp eggs candled ok at about 8 or 9 days, but half were cold when discovered on the empty nest on Monday (day 15). An accidentally broken one revealed a live (but slow) chick.

I hope the three cold turkey eggs recovered, too. We only have five left out of the eleven I set. They cost me $15. If all five hatch, they've cost me $3 ea. If only two hatch they cost me $7.50 each. I don't know if I'd bother again.

That nest (now with two hens) is a 44 gallon drum, off the ground sitting on an upturned pallet, in a pen covered by a tarp. The noise made by the imperfectly secured tarp is loud and surely annoying, but the immediate area around the drum has remained dry. Oh, and there is a sheet of corrugated iron positioned over top of the drum, too.

"Brownie" is still in the cosiest nest in the toybox-nesting-box in the main pen. I might candle her 18 eggs tonight (day 10) in case I can reduce the number.

A lightning strike would have to make a direct hit to or near to the pen killing every chook in there before it would affect Brownie or her eggs.

BTW that was a cool experiment with the steel spike. I had wondered what you meant by experiment.

Reedyman · **Posted:** Thu Sep 25, 2008 10:31 pm

fuzzfly · **Joined:** Wed Apr 09, 2008 10:42 pm **Posts:** 253

Never seemed to put off my pigeons or ducks in the past.

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