Because I have tons of free time...
A friend of mine said she had an incubator that she would let us borrow. That was the biggest expense right there! I was so excited that she let us borrow it. I found a farm on Craigslist that sold fertile chicken eggs for $5 per dozen. We trekked out to the farm and picked up 18 fertile eggs. They gave us a barnyard mix, so the eggs were all different shapes, sizes and color variations. We have a possibility of hatching Delawares, Plymouth Barred Rocks, Pure White Leghorn and Rhode Island Reds. Marlie was disappointed that we only had one white egg.
The first few days were super stressful. I had to move the incubator a few times to find the ideal place to keep it. Then we had a San Diego heat wave that made the incubator temperature spike to 102.9, which is a dangerously high temp for chicken embryos. If it gets to 103 for 1/2 hour or more, they typically die :0(
On day 8 we candled the eggs, trying to figure out if they had growing embryos in them. I was worried that our temp spike and the incredible learning curve in the beginning would have killed them all, but we were pleasantly surprised to see red blood vessles growing inside some of our our eggs.
Today is day 10. We've identified 14 as "winners" we can see a moving chicken inside. 2 we think are "yolkers" and weren't fertile. We think 1 is a "quitter" and stopped developing, as today we saw what we thought was a blood ring. Marlie was so sad. It was her favorite white egg that had a possible blood ring. I saw a moving embryo on day 7, but today it didn't move at all. I'm not 100% so we won't take it out yet, but the next few days we will know for sure. 1 egg is so dark that we can't tell if it's a quitter or a winner. It's definitely not a yolker, we can see something dark inside of it, but the shell is so dark and thick that we can't tell! We labled that one with a question mark.
The pictures are very blurry, but do you see the dark spot? There's our chicken!
You can see the air cell on the right side of the egg. This is where the chick first pips or breaks through. It takes it's first breath of air inside it's shell!And now for the real fun! We made a video!
My initial plan was to incubate the chicks and keep them until they got their feathers, then give them away on Craigslist. The give them away idea didn't last long, the kids talked me into keep some of them. I decided that we'd keep 4 hens (if we get 4 hens!). So while we wait for the eggs to incubate, now we are reading all about chicken coops, arks and tractors. JP said I was crazy, and that he doesn't have time to help me build a chicken coop. So it's up to the kids and me to figure out how to build a coop. We have some time, 11 days and about 6 weeks to be exact to get something ready for them! Hmmm where is that drill?
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