It's starting to feel a little spring-ish. The daffodils and tulips are starting to poke their leaves out of the ground. The robins have been hopping around for a few weeks. The killdeer are piping away at night and the red wing black birds are starting to hang out by the canals again. I even heard a couple of early frogs at night.
Spring means chick days at the feed stores.
I managed to go into two different feed stores and check out the chicks without bringing any home. I knew I had a whole incubator full of the the fluffy little peepers just waiting to hatch.
FAIL
I set 28 or so eggs. The 8 banty eggs were duds. I think she's just too small for the roo's to get the deed done with her. One egg hatched on it's own on day 20. A little grey wet chick was waiting for me when I woke up in the morning.
One more pipped on day 21 but after 24 hours of no progress I peeled back the shell slowly and the little mite was pretty much shrink wrapped in there. It died two days later. I'm pretty sure I did two things wrong with that hatch. I let the humidity get too high which causes the chicks to get too big in the shell and they can't pip out. The second mistake was trying something I read on the internet. A guy was putting his eggs in an egg carton with the large end up for the last three days. I had a lot of upside down chicks when I cracked open eggs to see what went wrong. I also think I candled them way too often/ handled them too much. In my zeal to see what was going on inside the eggs, I candled them like every other day.
Well I couldn't leave the one lone chick by itself now could I? Off to Valley Country Store we went. I picked out two silver laced wyandottes, and two more easter eggers.
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| Easter Egger |
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| Easter Egger |
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| Our chick we hatched |
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| Silver Laced Wyandotte |
I also started 30 more eggs in the bator and one little bany egg. This time I grabbed everything that was out there for three days. The first time I only set the EE's and the white eggs. This time I got every color of every egg that gets layed here and we're getting like 8 to 12 eggs a day.
One more pipped on day 21 but after 24 hours of no progress I peeled back the shell slowly and the little mite was pretty much shrink wrapped in there. It died two days later. I'm pretty sure I did two things wrong with that hatch. I let the humidity get too high which causes the chicks to get too big in the shell and they can't pip out. The second mistake was trying something I read on the internet. A guy was putting his eggs in an egg carton with the large end up for the last three days. I had a lot of upside down chicks when I cracked open eggs to see what went wrong. I also think I candled them way too often/ handled them too much. In my zeal to see what was going on inside the eggs, I candled them like every other day.
I am so sorry your eggs in the incubator did not do well. We have not tried an incubator yet, but have discussed trying it. The one you did hatch is adorable and so are all of its new friends. We got 4 Ameraucanas and 2 more production reds from Tractor Supply. One of them looks a lot like your second Easter Egger pic. Thanks for sharing with us at The HomeAcre Hop!
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~Ann