First off, thank you for the honest review—seriously. Shipping hatching eggs is like sending a wish in a bubble through a tornado: beautiful when it works, heartbreaking when it doesn’t. We're bummed this hatch didn’t go as planned, but we’re also really grateful you saw the good with the not-so-good.
A few things we want to lovingly (but sassily) point out for folks reading along:
A 40–50% hatch rate on shipped eggs is sadly the industry average, not because anyone’s cutting corners, but because air cells can detach, embryos can quit mid-way, or—yes—even skulls may not form correctly. That’s shipping trauma, not genetics. And it’s exactly why we focus on preservation: because landrace breeds fight through this chaos better than most.
Crooked beaks can happen for a ton of reasons—incubation humidity swings, genetic flukes, or hatch trauma. We’re watching this closely in our lines, but again… shipped eggs don’t always give us the full picture.
We love that you’re open to trying chicks in the future, and we can’t wait to ship some peepers your way when we're able. In the meantime, we hope your little survivors grow up bold, weird, and wonderful—just like the rest of us chicken keepers.
Raising chickens isn’t for the faint of heart—but it is for the ones who don’t quit after a rough hatch. You're our kind of people.