6:00am - Day 20. No signs of hatching.
9:00am - After talking with my Mom (the Chicken Expert), I add another bowl of warm water to the incubator to up the humidity, and VERY carefully, cradling each egg, quickly look at and listen to each egg. I hear faint peeping from Egg 3!
3:00pm - A TINY crack appears on the top of Egg 3! And chick continues to peep.
5:00pm - J and I notice that when we shine a flashlight into the incubator through the viewing window at Egg 3 the chick peeps and we can see it moving through the TINY slit in the membrane.
6:30pm - LOUDER cheeps! And a bigger chip of egg comes off. We can see the chick's egg tooth and beak and part of the body. It wiggles around and is YELLOW.
7:30pm - Another chick with a small hole. Moving a little inside the shell, but not peeping. It doesn't seem robust and is BLACK.
11:30pm - No changes in either chicks.
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| Yellow in the Incubator |
5:30am - Day 21. Yellow chick popped out while we were sleeping, and now in the brooder, peeping up a storm! Black has not made ANY progress. I'm wondering if it needs help, but I'll watch it for a while first.
6:30am - Black chick isn't moving anymore and still not peeping. It's breathing seems "off", so I decide to start helping it out a little. Finally! It makes some WEAK peeps when I clear it's beak. It's little head is wedged UNDER it's wing.
9:00am - Black chick dies. Yellow continues to do well!
12:30pm - We have a burial ceremony for Black and a baby Robin we had found under a tree in our yard. (Looks and sounds like the baby Robins hatched yesterday too!)
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| Tranferring Yellow to the Brooder - Still Drying off |
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| A few Minutes in Brooder |
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| Yellow Meets The Cat |
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| A Napping Fluff |
It turns out the other 2 eggs were NOT fertile, so it's just Yellow. The kids are VERY happy! It'll be one LOVED chicken! LOL They would like to incubate more eggs so we're "in talks" to get more eggs. (Mom might bring down a dozen next weekend.) Again, chicks will go to live with my Mom and her chickens in June.
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| Yellow at the End of the Day |
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| Fluffed All Out |
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| First Time Holding |
We hatched some chicks a while back. We got a full incubator full! However, that was after we inadvertently unplugged the incubator on round one. :( It was a learning experience for sure. Congratulations on your baby chick!
ReplyDeleteyay for yellow!!! so sorry black didn't make it. i think i would cry harder than the kids, but i really do want to incubate eggs. thanks for sharing!!
ReplyDeleteYeah for Yellow! We had about 50% of our eggs hatch. They grow FAST too! ;-)
ReplyDeletewonderful pictures!!
ReplyDeleteWhat an amazing miracle to watch close up!!! Great blog post & pictures!!
ReplyDeleteThis is great! congratulations :) We have baby chicks arriving very soon, too.
ReplyDeleteHow sweet! Your children must have loved the whole process of hatching chicks with the best part... when they actually hatch!
ReplyDeleteWhat great photos! How incredible to witness the miracle of new life and to share it with your children! Yellow is adorable! :-) I would love to do this with my children. A local farm charges a lot of money, so I'm looking into other avenues.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great post. We have chickens, but have never hatched them. That's something we're going to have to do latter on. Love the pics.
ReplyDelete--Rachel visiting from HHH
I wanted to let you know that I linked to you in a blog post I just published about our new chicks:
ReplyDeletehttp://thegettys.blogspot.com/2011/05/science-thursday-chicks.html