April 20, 2007

he eggs in the incubator started to hatch at 11:45pm last night. Here is a photo series following the journey of one chick hatching. 

11:45pm last night. The last check prior to 11:45pm was at 10 pm and nothing noticeable was happening then. I took pictures every 30 minutes of this egg. I posted the most obvious changes with their times for you. 

1:00 am This Morning

2:30 am More eggs started hatching. It is going to be a long night and no sleep for me. I need to run out to the greenhouse to toss more wood in the woodstove as well to keep my transplants happy. 

6:00 am. Not a very good picture. I think it slept from 2-5 am as it did not make any progress. 5 other eggs are starting. I heard chirping again. 








This is what a normal hatching egg proceeds to. The little guy I was taking pictures of all night, never made it to this stage and gave up after 12 hours of trying. 

10:30 am. Though you should never help a chick out of its egg, we did intervene as it was going on 12 hours for this chick and the membrane was as tough as leather. I splashed some of the eggs down a couple times and added more water to raise the humidity higher, though it seems to be in the right range. The rest I promise to leave alone. If you look right above its toes, at almost 12 O'clock, you can see its beak. A chick is pretty 'sardined' in an egg and it will take a bit to straighten out and dry. 8 eggs are starting to have chicks starting to hatch now.

3:00 pm.
We had to leave for a couple hours and when we came back, 3 more had hatched. The original chick who took so long to hatch is not doing well, but these new 3 hatched quite nicely and they are moving about great. I put them in a drawer lower down to be able to walk without tripping over eggs!!

8:00 pm.
I feel this hatch is very slow and with this being a new incubator to me, we have had only 8 chicks hatch thus far. The original chick is regaining his/her strength and should be looking like the other 3 strong chicks soon. In a couple hours they are going to go brood at Mary's house, followed by the rest which eventually hatch. At 9:30 pm, 5 of the first batch headed over to Mary's.