- Oct 22, 2013
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I've had a bad week this week - husband let out cat, chick escaped, am nursing it in my shirt right now - but I wanted to share a story that started off badly but had an unexpectedly happy ending.
A couple of weeks ago, about two weeks into incubation, my husband - there's a pattern here, right? - let our two year old unsupervised around our hen who was brooding 9 eggs. He loves eggs, and loves chickens, so he rolled her right out of her box, eggs and all. The first my husband knew of it was of the two-year-old saying "Yuck eggy". I wasn't there to see it, thankfully, or I'd have had a fit.
Two eggs were cracked and bleeding badly. We discarded those. I took the rest and candled them. One had a detached air cell - I made the call to let that one go cold and to sleep, rather than risk a horrible hatching death, as I don't have an incubator up and running so no way of holding the air cell upright where it should be. Of the 6 remaining, one had an indentation and crack all the way around, another a slight crack and another one had a hairline crack I could see on candling. They'd all suffered being rolled out onto concrete.
My hen was pretty traumatised and didn't want to go back to her nest (who can blame her?) so we decided to give them to our neighbour, whose hen had been brooding for about five weeks.
Before we did, I melted a beeswax candle and used my finger to smoosh wax around the cracks (I didn't drip hot wax directly onto the shells!) in the hope it would keep bacteria out and prevent moisture loss and further damage.
I wasn't expecting much. I mishandled an egg while candling a previous clutch about day 11 and it exploded around hatch time.
But guess what? 100% hatched! ALL SIX! I couldn't believe it. There was only one slight anomaly which might be unrelated - one chick had the same toe on each foot slightly curled, but it's doing okay with chick shoes.
In hindsight, I have no idea whether I did the right thing or whether the eggs at that stage would have been fine anyway - and obviously the fact that they were well-developed helped - but it was an unexpected event that I had to deal with in the heat of the moment without any real idea of what I was doing.
So that's my happy story for today!
A couple of weeks ago, about two weeks into incubation, my husband - there's a pattern here, right? - let our two year old unsupervised around our hen who was brooding 9 eggs. He loves eggs, and loves chickens, so he rolled her right out of her box, eggs and all. The first my husband knew of it was of the two-year-old saying "Yuck eggy". I wasn't there to see it, thankfully, or I'd have had a fit.
Two eggs were cracked and bleeding badly. We discarded those. I took the rest and candled them. One had a detached air cell - I made the call to let that one go cold and to sleep, rather than risk a horrible hatching death, as I don't have an incubator up and running so no way of holding the air cell upright where it should be. Of the 6 remaining, one had an indentation and crack all the way around, another a slight crack and another one had a hairline crack I could see on candling. They'd all suffered being rolled out onto concrete.
My hen was pretty traumatised and didn't want to go back to her nest (who can blame her?) so we decided to give them to our neighbour, whose hen had been brooding for about five weeks.
Before we did, I melted a beeswax candle and used my finger to smoosh wax around the cracks (I didn't drip hot wax directly onto the shells!) in the hope it would keep bacteria out and prevent moisture loss and further damage.
I wasn't expecting much. I mishandled an egg while candling a previous clutch about day 11 and it exploded around hatch time.
But guess what? 100% hatched! ALL SIX! I couldn't believe it. There was only one slight anomaly which might be unrelated - one chick had the same toe on each foot slightly curled, but it's doing okay with chick shoes.
In hindsight, I have no idea whether I did the right thing or whether the eggs at that stage would have been fine anyway - and obviously the fact that they were well-developed helped - but it was an unexpected event that I had to deal with in the heat of the moment without any real idea of what I was doing.
So that's my happy story for today!
