Saturday, February 21, 2009

A chicken in every pot

Chicken eggs incubate for 21 days. I was pretty sure by day 14 that we weren't going to get much if anything out of my first hatch. The Frizzle and Silkie eggs had been badly scrambled by the Post Office and my wildly varying temps in my old incubator couldn't have helped the other eggs much. Problem was I couldn't really candle the other eggs very well since they were all dark egg colors so I didn't know what was going on in there.
So day 21 came and went without so much as a peep from any of the eggs. In the meantime I'd gotten my new incubator and had filled it with eggs and had pinned all my hopes on the future hatch so I'd determined that I would throw the old eggs out on day 22. Yesterday the cat seemed quite interested in my incubator and a check revealed a newly hatched baby chick. Looks like an Easter Egg pullet and she's really strong and pretty. I decided well, maybe, the average temp was a little cool and slowed down hatch and I'd better give all those eggs another day. I checked almost every hour and nothing except a very noisy little baby chicken. Later in the day I thought I saw one of the brown eggs move but by bedtime there was nothing going on so I convinced myself that I'd been mistaken.
This morning I wanted to throw out the old eggs because I wanted to give the sole survivor of my hatch some more room to run around in the incubator. I gave all the eggs to Riss and told her to throw them out. She came back a few minutes later to show me an egg with a break in it's shell. Oh no, I almost threw out a baby! But surely all the moving around had killed it or perhaps it was the egg I saw yesterday and it had broken the shell yesterday and was dead now. So I broke EVERY rule of hatching and cracked the egg a little. And we hear "peep, peep." Everyone has been glued to the incubator all day waiting to see if the little one would live or not. I was pessimistic but late this afternoon I heard the loudest chirping ever and sure enough the little chick was working his way out of the egg. New chick is probably some kind of red chicken mixed with Wyandotte, probably a roo.
So the new question is.....can I throw out the old eggs NOW????

1 comment:

  1. I would've said to wait, but since I'm late... what was the final count?

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