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[zephyr_hound]

 I bought a male and female peafowl and they laid eggs but never hatched the young. Chickens, same. Turkeys, same. Dwarves do not have access to the nest boxes. I even locked both the peafowls in together with a nest box, in case the male needed to be right there at the moment of laying, and gave up after the female had been sitting there a year. I've only had one clutch of eggs hatch, very early on, and that was from a modded creature; even those animals have failed to hatch any subsequent clutches, despite having exactly the same setup of locked room/claimed nest box as before. It's as if I can only get one batch of eggs hatched per fort. 0.31.25, but fort was made in .23 if that makes any difference.

any suggestions? I want peachicks

[Sphalerite]

I have had egg-laying creatures successfully hatch eggs in 31.25.  It did take a while - over a year unless I'm mistaken, between when the eggs were laid and when they hatched.  You might just need to wait longer.  Of course, the egg has to stay in the nest box, and the female has to stay on the egg, non-stop for it to work.

[krag123]

I managed to create a breeding chamber for my birds.  I created a 17x17 room, and filled it with 120 nest boxes and only 2 birds.  I then locked the door making sure no dwarfs could go in and loot the eggs.  2 years later that room has well over 100 full grown egg laying machines.

The key I have learned is making sure there is no way for the dwarfs to get in the room before you have a large flock of birds to supply your fort with food.

I have plans to expand to 2 17x17 rooms, as the one just does not seem to supply enough eggs.

[darthbob88]

I've had success with elk birds and helmet snakes, but haven't really tried it with anything else; peafowl and turkeys just don't have that wonderful x3/x2 value modifier. In both cases, I've had multiple clutches, accessible by everyone, and with males present in the fortress area. All it really demands, AFAIK, is that the eggs not be disturbed.

[Drawde]

I've run into this as well.  You have a male bird, the female claims the box and lays eggs, and 2-3 years later the female is still sitting on the unhatched eggs.  The thing is it doesn't always happen.  It's made it difficult for me to test a modded creature I made since at least half the clutches never hatch.  They sometimes do though, so I know it's working.

No idea why though.

[ST753M]

I've had this problem too.  I was modding chickens of various sizes to try out the egg-size-influences-hatch-time theory.  Only about a third of the nests hatched, evenly distributed over all 5 sizes.  I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong; I was certain to keep my dwarves away from the nests and the birds weren't disturbed. 

I tried again with only one of each chicken size (instead of 5 of each), and I still got only about a third to hatch, so it didn't seem to be a limit on how many nests could be fertile at once. 

[Saiko Kila]

My birds stopped hatching after animal population reached certain limit. They still sit on eggs, just waiting. This differ from unfertilized egg, because I think I had them before and birds were just abandoning them (but maybe they were unhatched because birds were abandoning them, for whatever reason). Anyway, trying to cull other birds should be a good start. When I do that, some of eggs hatch. If it doesn't work - just unforbid these eggs, dwarves will get them, and after some time birds will lay new ones.

Similarly, animals stop breeding if there are too many of them. I've heard it was about 50 animals of any kind, but in my fortress some species have a population of only a dozen or so, an some have over 60, and they stop breeding anyway. Killing some will help - even killing animals of other species (but maybe similar, like grazers to grazers) will help. In fact, this is how I make elephantplosions, donkeyplosions, llamaplosions, sheeplosions and alpacaplosions. I have 500 eggs and 20 metric tonnes of meat. And no elves to buy it.