The Final Cut!

Here are the long promised movies we made of our chick hatching!!

We ended up with 10 baby chicks. 2 eggs never developed and 6 died before hatching. 1 of the 10 needed 'help' to hatch. He is the little yellow runt. Half way through the hatching process I put the rest of the eggs in cartons. I will always wonder if we might have saved a couple more by doing this at 'lockdown' [the day you stop turning them]. I think I might also have the hatch in the bathroom, so we can easily bring the temp. and humidity in the room up to the incubator level so that opening and removing chicks from the incubator would be more doable. I did not like hatched chicks pecking on the in progress chicks. The kids won special recognition at the local homeschool science fair for being the most fun exhibit. [Yep, took laptop and showed the videos, live animals not allowed.]

I highly recommend the backyardchickens.com forum for information and support! A great group.

Here's an overview movie:

Here's a nice hatch:

The kids made their own video of one of the hatchings.

We had many friends over that day to see the amazing miracles!

They were such cute fluff balls and fun to watch and play!

This was the best 'science project' ever, I highly recommend it.

next post: rats.

chicken little

Well it's the end of day 22 of incubation [21 is 'standard'] and we have NINE! baby chicks. They are coming in all colors and sizes, from 'tiny' to 'humongous' and from 'tuxedo' to 'chipmunk.'

We also have 1 still working on hatching and 6 eggs just sitting there. [crossing fingers]

Waiting for these last ones has been very stressful for me! I am taking it harder than the kids! Here I am still up, sitting next to the incubator! Even so, this has been the BEST science project by far! I highly recommend it.

Soon our project will be done and our babies will go on to have happy chicken lives on the farm.

Here's some pictures of our babies:

Little Swimmer!

My dh attempted to video tape me candling eggs. Next time we won't invite the kids, lol. All the eggs we looked at had little black dots moving around!! So it was very exciting and happy. These are baby chicks on day 6 of incubation:

"Candling Eggs"

YAY! We attempted our first candling this evening and were super spastic excited!

Candling is when you shine a bright light through the egg so you can see what's going on inside. Kind of like 'ultrasound' for chicks. We used a bright desk lamp with a movable neck and I made a cardboard table with a small cutout for the light to shine on the egg. This way, we were able to set the egg down on the 'holder' and take pictures!. We only candled three eggs tonight and all of them looked good! It is normal to loose a bunch- especially first timers like us, so the fact that we randomly picked three good ones out of 18 seems like a great sign to us!

Here's one, but I bet my husband's photos were better. I'll try to get them up too.

The spidery veins and dark spot is the developing chicken:

Let the Incubation Begin-

So, I have avoided posting until I really had something cool to share, lol. Well, happily, now I do and not a day too soon: For my 2 Second Graders, I decided they could incubate some chicken eggs for the annual homeschool science fair. On one of our local lists is a homeschool mom that RENTS the incubators AND the eggs. Once you are done- you can give them back. It's a really cool idea as it just makes its seem so much more assessable. I picked up the eggs, incubator, chick food and water [for after hatching] and the instructions. It's a simple styrofoam electric incubator w/ no turner. We set it up and left it overnight [I moved it a couple of times] and next morning added the eggs. Since we'll be turning the eggs, we marked them with Xs and Os on opposite sides to keep track of their rotation. Saturday we will start 'candling' with a bright lamp covered w/ cardboard. . . The incubation process takes about 21 days. . . and I'll keep you 'posted' right here!

We have eggs from at least 3 different types of chickens:

Here Cordell is marking the Xs and Os as we add them to the incubator. Melodie did some too.

Next, I'll try to post photos of turning the eggs and candling. . . stay tuned!