I woke up to pips! 1 in each hatcher, an Olive Egger and a .... whatever I'm going to call these Twentse/Legbar/EE/Niederrheiners that are coming out of blue eggs.
Supposedly a long time ago the Niederrheiners were auto sexing. We'll see who gets the head poof of the Legbar or the chipmunk cheeks of the EE... it would be crazy cool if I scored some barred partridge colors with the head crest, cheeks, walnut comb AND the blue eggs. Wishful thinking I bet. I'll definitely be scrutinizing chick fluff for any auto sexing features. My plan is to hatch like crazy from that group and pull out the ones I like and see if I can get them going into something consistent. The core traits being colored eggs, large size, nifty feathers, winter hardiness... bonus points if I can get them back into auto sexing without losing size. I don't want to breed back to Legbar if I can help it though.
The Olive Eggs have the same dad, those daughters will get bred back to Marans. Keeping it simple there. In theory it give them a double dose of green egg, going back to the Marans darkens it.
Trying not to get excited or count them before they hatch. I'm still traumatized from last year's terrible hatches, so I have this fear that out of all those eggs I'll only get a handful. Every egg that went into lockdown had movement, so I'm hopeful!
If the cheap incubators don't make reliable hatchers, then I might have to cave and buy the matching cabinet hatcher to the Sportsman cabinet. That would just be... so terrible... the way it would fill all 8 brooders in one go...