Nervous chicken mother
I am a nervous chicken
mother. For three weeks now, the kitchen thermometer has occupied
one of my central processors and I even had a nightmare that the heater
was running too hot (only to wake up and find that I was right.)
I've peered at the eggs, candled
them, topped off
their water, and, as of Friday, taken
out the egg turner and replaced it with a paper liner for hatching. Despite all that, I
didn't really believe we'd end up with a living chick. "If we
even get one," I promised myself, "it will be a success."
Twenty-one days will be
up today at 1 pm, and by Friday night I was starting to lose
faith. I'd read all kinds of reports on the internet of ways
chicks can die in the shell. Not only can I kill them if I let
the temperature get too hot or too cold (which I did a grand total of
four times), but the chicks could drown while trying to hatch if I kept
the incubator too humid. Shells that look porous when candled
(didn't I have one of those?) tend to let in bacteria and the chicks
die young, and then there's the question of whether our old hens are
even able to create a viable embryo at their advanced ages.
Then, Saturday
afternoon, I heard a strange bumping sound from the corner of the
kitchen. I pulled out the incubator and peered in to see that not
one but two eggs were rocking to and
fro. Someone was alive inside! Half an hour later, a third
egg joined the chorus, and at supper time egg number four chimed
in. Then, silence as the wearied chicks rested inside their hard
shells.
Today will be the big
day. Will we hatch live chicks? How many? Whose
eggs? So far, all three eggs laid by the young Golden Comet have
shown signs of life along with one of the eggs from the old
girls. No matter what happens, I plan to throw another batch of
eggs in as soon as the chicks are fully dry and ready to move to a
brooder --- if I can manage to keep at least 57% of my eggs alive to 20
days, this incubation experiment has merit. It's a good thing I
"planned" this hatch to coincide with a day of rest, because it's going
to take a team of mules to drag me away from my spectator role.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Far too exciting! I woke up at 6 am and came in with a flashlight to check on the eggs. Went back to sleep for an hour to dream about chicks and incubators and brooders, then woke up again to see two eggs with little holes forming and the chicks peeping loudly inside their shells.
Good luck to your mom!
Hey Anna, Thanks for your diligent posts. My farmer and I built a 200 egg incubator out of an old refrigerator. I am stoked to repurpose old stuff. Anywho, the farmer has been putting the turkey poults in the Inc in batches so he waits a few days and leaves them in his house for up to a week until he has enough to batch. My question is: how long did you take from the hen laying the egg until you actually put the egg in the incubator?
Also what do you think you are paying in electricity to hatch these 7 eggs? per day and for the whole sha-bang.
Best to you and yours, Steven
Those are great questions! Our flock is pretty small and old, so it took me four days to save up the eggs. In the meantime, I kept the eggs blunt-end up in an egg carton and tipped them twice a day --- see this post about storing eggs for hatching. The age of the eggs didn't seem to make a difference in the hatch.
I meant to plug in the Kill-o-watt to answer your question, but didn't! So I'll have to go on what the manual says which is 12 watts average, 18 watts maximum. Assuming we used the maximum (probably true --- I let it get somewhat chilly at night), we used about 9 kw for the 21 day period, which probably cost about 90 cents. That said, we also had to run a space heater at night for most of the time to keep the temperature around the incubator high enough for it to work, so the price was considerably more!