Arizona Chickens

[AZBootsie]

Tracydr-

The chicken pluckin queen video was great!!

 

[pdx2phx]

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Ooh...best of luck to you and your little hen. We had one have a bad prolapse/egg binding, and she kept pushing it back out, even after a vet visit and stitching. Hopefully yours can keep all of her insides where they are supposed to be...

 

[nurseshelly]

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If you can find a nice size, cheap wine cooler, they are easy to convert and work well. Mine is a Danby (they make great incubators, but are sucky wine coolers, so you often find them broken for cheap). With mine, the temperature gauges for the top and bottom zone work, and probably 4 or 5 of the 6 fans. It used to be 5, but we think one went out because the temps were suddenly not stable, but we can't find it without moving the cooler. So, we added a fan to the bottom, which makes the temps really super stable.
You just cut out the compressor, drill holes in the bottom back of the cooler, add a light kit or two (we did two, in case one goes out), install them, and connect the plugs to a thermostat, we used a reptile thermostat. It turns it on at 98.8 and off at 99.8. This seems to be the ideal temp range since now our seramas are hatching on day 21, instead of day 19. We got a humidity / temp gauge that is meant to go in a cigar box, it's a nice inexpensive digital gauge. We also added two egg turners after a bit. Now that I'm doing dry incubation, I barely ever have to even open it, except to take eggs out or put them in. Of course if it didn't have fans, we would probably need more fans than the one mini desk fan. On ours the temp gauge, the lights and the fans all run independent of the compressor. It looked like they all were on the same plug, but when we took it apart, the compressor was plugged into the main power.
The hardest thing was figuring out how it was wired, and how to take the compressor off without damaging the wiring to the fans and lights / temp gauge. It turned out much easier than it looked. Once we had the compressor unbolted, it was obvious how to do it. But we spent probably half an hour staring at it before we were brave enough to unbolt it.

 

[kevs-chickadees]

So my son informed us this afternoon that we had two pips, it was barely day 20. Well those two pips have now hatched, Yea! I just hope since we haven't seen any other pips since then that these 2 are early birds and that the others will be showing up shortly. Never had any early, always late day 21 and on. Keeping fingers crossed.

 

[pimachickens]

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Congratulations!!

 

[Mahonri]

Hi all

Still mourning the loss of all my roos, Icelandics and Marans.

Got 5 eggs today. 1 leghorn, 1 polish, 2 Ameraucanas and 1 olive egger. The only one of the active layers that didn't lay was my marans.

My two brahmas, the RIR, the SLW and the NH should all start laying within the next 30 days.

The one little Ameraucana that hatched out in August looks to be a wheaten roo... wish I dared to keep him.... I also wish I'd kept my splash ameraucana roo, at least until he started to crow.

Oh well, guess I'll learn to be happy with what I'm allowed to have.

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

HOME! Had a wonderful few days visiting family and friends in Texas, but am so glad to be home! I'll try to catch up here tomorrow.

 

[Mikey D]

I've got them eating out of my hand!

And they're NIPPLE TRAINED!!!!

Yay!!

And they're consuming food voraciously!

If you are getting sick of these picts, let me know and I'll lighten up. Still pretty excited though...

 

[Mahonri]

I love the chick pics!

 

[Mikey D]

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