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:

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:

"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: