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.

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:

Cracked

Well, today was a sad day. When we turned the eggs first thing this morning, we dropped and cracked one of the eggs. I immediately put tape on it and did a google search. Funny thing is, people have successfully hatched a cracked egg!! Maybe not two weeks out. . . but still. Later, I accidentally got water on it, which was then trapped in the tape. So I took off the tape. [No more damage done thankfully.] And melted some candle wax on it; an idea I found on a chicken website. I tried to candle it to see if there even was a live baby chick inside, but these darn green/blue eggs are not candling nicely!! Not even on other days when we tried candling.

Here's our egg: Hoping it can last!! Not sure if I want to do any more candling and risk handling the eggs. . . Maybe in a few days. . . For now, I'm just going to leave this one alone [other than turning] and pray for the best:

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!