reading time: 3 Session minutes
The use of artificial brooders is a common practice in modern hatcheries, and many backyard poultry owners use them to hatch chicks. Quails, chickens, ducks, geese, geese and turkeys can be hatched regularly in a variety of incubators. But how long have artificial incubators been around? hundred years? Maybe two hundred years?
Try more than 2,000 years. correct. Many ancient writers commented on seeing or hearing the artificial incubator “furnaces” used in Egypt. In 400 BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote that a strange form of incubation was going on in ancient Egypt. He wrote that the eggs “hatched spontaneously in the ground by being buried in mounds of dung”. A few hundred years later, the first-century BC Greek historian Diodorus Siculus referred to a secret Egyptian incubation method in his 40-volume tome, History Library. The most surprising fact is that men, because of their unusual application to such matters [in Egypt] who have charge of poultry and geese, in addition to producing them by the natural method known to all mankind, raise them with their own hands, by virtue of their own skill, in indescribable numbers.”
As early as the Old Kingdom (c. 2649 – 2130 BC), the Egyptians succeeded in finding ways to reproduce the heat and humidity needed to incubate eggs without a brooding hen. By creating adobe ovens or ovens, the ancient Egyptians could keep fertilized eggs warm in a room heated gently by a firebox. It seems that dung, manure and plant matter were used to keep the heat even and to keep the moisture in the ‘furnace’ of the eggs. This type of incubator has been in continuous use in Egypt ever since.
17y Eighteenth-century European travelers to Egypt wrote about the same types of furnace incubators. The French entomologist René Antion Verchault de Reaumur, visiting one of these ancient hatcheries, wrote that “Egypt should be more proud of it than its pyramids.”
Reaumur described buildings about 100 feet long, called “incubators,” which were built with four-foot-thick outer walls composed of insulating, sun-dried mud bricks. Incubators have a long central entrance with up to five egg “ovens” on either side. Each oven consists of a lower chamber (with only a small opening to regulate moisture loss) where the fertilized eggs are placed. The upper chamber of each oven was used as a firebox to keep the eggs warm, and a hole in the roof of that chamber let the smoke out. Incubators can hold up to 200,000 eggs, and a family may lay 40,000 eggs at a time, directly for poultry farmers.
According to Reaumur (who not only gave detailed descriptions of oven brooders but built his own while in Egypt), two days before the incubation period, these fires were started in all the upper rooms and kept at 110 degrees Fahrenheit before being allowed to subside. Ten degrees. Then the oven floors below were covered with a layer of bran, and finally, fertilized eggs were brought inside and placed on top. For the next two weeks, the eggs were stirred three or four times daily, and the temperature was maintained at 100 degrees Fahrenheit by increasing and decreasing the fires. While Reaumur used a hygrometer during his experiments, generations of Egyptian families keeping poultry learned to estimate temperature and humidity by gently applying eggs to the sensitive skin of their eyelids.
Egyptian brooders work well, in large part because desert humidity is very constant and easy to regulate. Reaumur noted that when he tried to build an incubator in France, the diverse climate made his attempt a failure.
Poultry incubators in modern Egypt still use oven incubators much like the older versions. A number of incubators have been retrofitted using electric heat and various practices aimed at improving biosecurity. For example, many now place rubber pellets under the eggs instead of under the bran, and companions wear gloves while turning the eggs. Other old brooders now heat with gasoline lamps rather than dung fires but still maintain some of the old procedures.
resources
- Abdelhakim, MMA, Thieme, O., Ahmed, ZS, and Schwabenbauer, K. (2009, March 10-13). Management of traditional poultry hatcheries in Egypt [paper presentation]. 5y International Poultry Conference, Taba, Egypt.
- Reaumur, Rene Antion Verschault de, (1823) Domestic birds of all kindsTranslated by Miller. (London: C Davies). https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=JndIAAAAYAAJ&pg=GBS.PP8&hl=ar
- Sutcliffe, JH (1909). Natural and artificial incubation, with diagrams and description of eggs at different stages of incubation, description of incubators and greeters. Feathered World, London.
- Traverso, F. (2019, March 29). Egyptian egg ovens are even more amazing than the pyramids. Retrieved September 25, 2021 from Atlas Obscura: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/egypt-egg-ovens
Mark M Hall He lives with his wife, three daughters, and several pets on a four-acre plot in rural paradise, Ohio. Mark is a seasoned small chicken farmer and avid nature observer. As a freelance writer, he strives to share his life experiences in an informative and entertaining way.