Hatching Eggs and Other Modern Miracles
My husband and I gave a try at incubating our first batch of eggs. We’ve had chickens for 15+ years and we’ve let broody hens raise eggs with mixed results in the past. This spring we decided we would jump in and incubate a full set of 40 eggs. There are a lot of other articles about how to manage the incubating process, but I couldn’t find any articles that really detailed the hatching process. It’s so exciting, I wanted to share my experience…
3pm on day 21 (Friday), we heard peeping from inside the eggs. No cracks were visible. The peeping was faint and intermittent. Can they really peep from inside the shell?
4am on Saturday morning, one chick had made it out of the shells. Still wet, gangly, exhausted, but alive! As soon as the first chick hatched, managing the humidity was a challenge. It would raise up considerably as they dried out, then drop considerably if I wiped off the glass lid.
7am on Saturday morning, second chick was out and flopping around. The more he flopped and bumped into the other eggs, the more peeping could be heard. It’s as if he was waking up all the other chicks after a long slumber party.
Noon on Saturday, five chicks hatched. First two chicks were dry and fairly mobile, the other 3 were in the wet, exhausted stage. We left them all in the incubator as alarm bells for the other chicks. The last thing chicks do inside the egg is consume / ingest the yolk for nourishment, so they don’t need to eat right away. That’s how the commercial hatcheries can ship them to you without food.
6pm Saturday, another 4 chicks hatched. Amazingly all chicks figured out how to stumble across the shells and remaining eggs and huddle together. They would take turns being completely crashed out in a lifeless heap and standing quite proud of themselves, chirping away.
3pm Sunday, we finally moved them out of the incubator, into a brooder after a full 48 hours had passed since the first one hatched. (And yes, we buried the remaining eggs.)
A 25% success ratio wasn’t very good for our first go around, and we have a few things to improve on. We didn’t candle them properly and I suspect a lot of the eggs were not fertilized because we had a very young, kind rooster, who hadn’t woo’d all of the hens yet. I am really happy, however that our 9 chicks all lived and are growing nicely, AND they are all straight Barred (or Plymouth) Rocks. We have many mixed hens and so it was a bit of a guess that I was only collecting Barred Rock eggs for the incubator.
