> How to tell if Cardinal eggs are fertile or not?

How to tell if Cardinal eggs are fertile or not?

Posted at: 2014-11-15 
A Cardinal will abandon as they do not tolerate a nest move or even one visit to the nest.

A few days ago my family found a birds nest inside a fallen fold-up chair. It turns out after we had Easter at our house (the chairs were in use at that time) and folded the chairs back up, the mother had actually made a nest inside the chair. We only found out about this after a storm the next day and the chair had toppled over. My Dad put gloves on and moved the nest to another chair and made sure where he put it, she would be able to see it. The mother was nowhere to be found and did not look like she would ever return. We ended up taking the nest in and putting it in a box and placed a light above it and put a sheet of foil on top of that (wanted to make sure that it was getting enough heat). It has been 3 days now and I have been candling all 4 eggs each day. Two of the eggs have been cracked from the fall and I feel as if they will not survive. The first day I saw what I thought to be the embryo floating around and dark spot on each wall of the egg. The second day all of the embryos were not floating around anymore and only the spot on the wall remained. In one of the eggs the spot was not sticking to the wall of the egg like the others. The next day when I candled them again that same egg did no longer have a spot on the wall, it looks like there is nothing inside it anymore and I feel that it is not alive anymore. I'm still not sure about the other eggs either. If anyone has any advice that would be greatly appreciated.