It's the morning of day 22 and we now have 5 chicks.
We learned a hard lesson yesterday. We tried to help the 3rd one hatch. It was doing ok, but we were impatient. It went badly and the chick died. When Mama went broody we said we would "let her do it" and we should have stuck to that. I really think if we had left that chick alone she/he would have made it.
By late afternoon there were 3 pips. It took a lot of willpower, but we left them alone. And we were rewarded with 3 more chicks this morning! Three more eggs have pips and I can see one chick's beak moving in the egg. (The blue egg near the front in the picture). Fortunately, we have plans today and will be gone until the late afternoon. We won't have to fight the temptation to see what is happening (and if we can help). Hopefully we will have 3 more chicks by evening.
So of 14 eggs:
We lost 2 before they started hatching.
We have 5 very cute hatched chicks
1 died during the bungled hatch
3 pips working to hatch right now.
3 more eggs??? (Two of those still have some residue from the broken egg)
This was a first time for us to try to hatch chicks. If we do it again, we will do a lot of things differently. We have learned a lot. I think we are very lucky to have as many chicks as we do considering the mistakes we have made. We can thank FrizzledHen for the good fertilized eggs and Mama for doing such a good job her first time in spite of our bungles. We also thank everyone of the Forum for their encouragement.
I will post more pictures this evening, hopefully with 8 chicks! Even though we had that big disappointment yesterday, I am very excited again.
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