Hatch-O-Rama

Well, our bumbling first-time attempt at incubating eggs has just about come to a close.  We still have two eggs in the incubator that look to still be viable, so we are giving them another day before we “call the hatch.” While we had hoped for a higher hatch rate (we are currently at 30%), we knew there were risks: ordering hatching eggs to be delivered via U.S. post, our electricity went out for 8 hours, and using our incubator for the first-time. Not to mention, our own beginner’s jitters.  Still, we hatched three healthy, spunky chicks!

The first pip was on Monday night, the night of day 20 and Baby #1 was born about 18 hours later, at mid-day on Day 21. We could hear more cheeps coming from the eggs and on Wednesday morning we had two more pips. These two chicks hatched fairly quickly and both were out of the shells by mid-morning.

This chick got herself unzipped in just about an hour of steady work. We sipped our early morning coffee (it was about 6:30 am) and watched as she worked her way around the shell.  Our visibility was good for hatch #2.

While Kori had to go to work, Teri was able to watch and report on Hatch #3–this was an Easter Egger/Ameraucana egg and we were so hoping at least one of the two we incubated would hatch.

This chick took a few moments to rest, all curled up in the remaining shell, before completing the hatch. It gave us a chance to see how chicks position themselves for hatching. While we’d seen this in books, it is always amazing to see the real thing happening in real life!

She finally pushed her way out into the world and flopped out all soppy wet. She only rested for a few minutes, however, before she started making her way around the incubator in an awkward scootch.

And here we have the three newest additions at Raggedy Hen Farm! We may be adding a few more to round out this spring’s babies, and we have learned a ton from our first incubating adventure. Welcome chicks!

If you’d like to watch the video of the first egg hatching, you can find it on our Youtube channel!

More than Halfway

Today marks our passing into the second half of the incubating adventure.  In other words, we are more than halfway through the 21-day incubation period and we still have no idea what will happen! We’ve been turning the eggs regularly three to five times each day; recording temperature, checking humidity, and we’ve even given candling our best shot a time or two. As near as we can tell, the majority of the eggs seem to be developing, but there  are a couple where we just aren’t sure what we’re looking at. What we do know is that the dark shadows are continuing to grow in most of the eggs. In the lighter-shelled eggs, we can sometimes see the embryo move, but in the darkest shelled-eggs, we just see blobs…

This is not our photo, but one we borrowed from an online forum–it shows the shadow of the embryo, as well as the growing larger shadow with in the egg. This is a good example of what the eggs look like when we candle them now.

At this stage in incubation, the embryo has done most of its early development. He or she has little wings and feet and feathers, and the beak is starting to harden and the bones calcify. Today marks the point where eyelids are developing over the eyes and downy feathers should be growing all over the little critters. For the next week or so, we’ll continue to turn the eggs and the viable embryos should continue to grow larger, while the air sack at the fatter end of the egg should get a bit bigger too.  This time next week, we’ll be getting ready for “lockdown”–the time when we up the humidity levels, stop turning, and allow the embryos to prepare themselves for hatching. That is, of course, if it goes according to plan!

Nature vs. Nurture

We will spare you the hour-by-hour details of our snow storm that turned into an ice storm except to say, we lost electricity.  This would not be a huge deal if it wasn’t for the fact that we are incubating those ten chicken eggs in an electric incubator. Crud.

The power went off at 5 pm on Saturday evening and when we called our local electric board to report the outage, the lines were busy, the phone messaging was in a loop, and it took several tries before we were able to report. So many folks are without electricity with the ice snapping branches and trees and power lines all over the valley.

We fussed. This is only the second time we’ve lost electricity since being in our home on Cedar Street and the first time was only for about 20 minutes. We got our our “Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens” by Gail Damerow and studied every word of the section on power outages. She advises to open the incubator and let the eggs cool and then, when the power goes back on, put the lid back on and start things up again.  Seems attempting to keep everything warm will actually cause more problems by keeping oxygen from getting to the eggs and messing with the humidity.  According to Ms. Damerow, if the power is out less than 12 hours, it shouldn’t affect the hatch significantly–especially in the early stages of development.  She says that chicken eggs (and probably other bird eggs) are designed so that they go dormant when they get cool. While this was hard for us to believe, we decided to follow orders.

Since we had the lid off the eggs anyway, we decided to candle them–even though we may not be able to really see anything until about 7 days.  We figured if we were going to lose them all to Mother Nature and the Eugene Water and Electric Board (EWEB), we might as well see if any were fertile, viable and developing. Besides, it was dark anyway and that should make candling easier!

We weren’t able to see much in the dark-shelled eggs, but in the lighter-shelled ones, we could see the veins and tiny embryo indicating that the eggs were fertile and developing normally.  This was exciting and nerve-wracking as we now knew that at that point, they were viable. Whatever happened with the temperature could definitely affect that.

As the hours passed and the eggs got cooler, we talked ourselves through the cranky frustration and accepted the fact that we may very well have to start over when all was said and done. At 1:15 am–after being off for just over 8 hours, the electricity came back on. We crossed our fingers, put the lid back on the incubator, turned it on and went to bed. We will have to wait a few days before we candle the eggs again and see if they are still developing, or they were victims of the storm of February 2014. Now we are just hoping our power woes are over.

And Then There Were Ten

The incubation adventure continues as we turn the eggs 3-5 times a day, making sure that they do not spend the night on the same side two nights in a row. We mark some important data on a spreadsheet each time we turn the eggs: the room temperature, the incubator temperature, the time we turn, whether or not we add water, and any comments about the eggs themselves. On day 2, egg #2 had a crack, so we removed that one.  Once and egg is cracked, bacteria gets inside (and the temperature can no longer be regulated) and the embryo, if it was developing, will die, so there is no point in leaving it in the incubator. We are not sure how the crack happened, but it is an expected reality of a risky venture.

Meanwhile, we just keep carefully turning and monitoring the temperature and humidity.  We have no way of knowing what is going on inside the eggs and they look exactly the same as they did the day we set them in the incubator. We can only hope that all is going well (while preparing ourselves for whatever the outcome might be.) We are getting anxious for day 7, when we get to candle the egglets and see if we can determine how well they are developing! Stay tuned…