Hello from Thailand

[swampfox440]

How cute she is !

 

[Grammy60]

Good morning all

View attachment 2584488Today there was more chirping from the incubator when I woke up this morning. But looking inside I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Putting on my glasses and peering more carefully through the window, I noted one of the Jungle Fowl eggs had a small piece of shell missing, though the outer membrane seemed intact. On closer inspection, I could see a small tear in the membrane, which moved every time I heard a peep. My first encounter with a pipping chick!

There began the longest 12 hour vigil since my wife gave birth a few decades ago... My chick kept struggling and chirping for help, and it was all I could do to leave well enough be and let nature take it's course. I'd read enough warnings here not to interfere that I knew attempting to assist the struggling young bird would likely do more harm than good. So hard as it was, I refrained and only observed. For the next 10 hours, my little chickadee made little progress, though eventually the membrane tear got a little longer and a couple of additional small eggshell pieces fell off. So I went out to pick up a take home meal, and when I got back, I could see a crack had developed in the shell at the edge of the hole. Over the next 30 minutes the crack got longer and longer, and the little chick kept pushing and pushing, till the crack gave way and the whole circumference was breached. Zippering had succeeded! 10 minutes later and the chick was free of confinement and ready to explore her new world.

Those of you who have hatched hundreds of birds before would not have been as anxious or excited about such a common event as I was. But as it was my first time, I was worried had I done everything right. Was the humidity too high or low? How bout the temps? They say you never forget your first time?? How about you? Do you still recall the first time a chick unveiled for you?

Above is a picture of Woodstock. She's now resting comfortably waiting for her siblings to join her.

Oh my goodness, how tiny and cute

 

[Thailander]

Oh my goodness, how tiny and cute

Only 19 grams soaking wet! About 2/3 the weight of a bantam chick....

 

[BYC910]

Hello, welcome to BackYard Chickens. Thank you for joining our community. Great introduction!

Interesting Reading .Sounds like an adventure .Jungle fowl used to foraging for food makes perfect sense. Welcome to BYC good luck .7 Pyrenees get 2 eggs per feeding .Every trip for dog food is $85 Us dollars every 2 weeks .Eggs added to the food really increases protien. So better catch some more free range chickens .

 

[Thailander]

Interesting Reading .Sounds like an adventure .Jungle fowl used to foraging for food makes perfect sense. Welcome to BYC good luck .7 Pyrenees get 2 eggs per feeding .Every trip for dog food is $85 Us dollars every 2 weeks .Eggs added to the food really increases protien. So better catch some more free range chickens .

Jungle fowl eggs are only 20 to 25 grams, half a chicken egg. So I'll have to have 4 fowl per dog to give them a similar amount as 2 chicken eggs per day. Add a fifth one to compensate for the occasional missed egg laying day. Then add 20 more which will give me up to 8 extra chicks per day (for meat) after hatching (assuming 50% hatch rate) So my flock for 8 dogs needs to be 60 laying hens, plus the supply of 500 meat chicks growing for 2 months, which is do-able if I have 10 or so tractors. The plus side is the birds don't eat much now, and should eat even less once I move them to the chicken tractor, since in nature that's how they survive.

I have over 20 fertile eggs incubating now. My two hens are giving me 2 fertile eggs per day, but the hatch rate has been pretty low. Hopefully it improves as I just changed to a larger homebuilt forced air cabinet incubator.

Clearly replacing kibble with poultry is going to involve a lot of additional work... and yes, I know I'll need other protein sources like ducks, rabbits and guinea pigs, which will reduce the need for jungle fowl proportionately. Just doing chicken math for now...

 

[Vickischics]

After browsing the forums for a couple of months I decided it was time to join the party, so today I signed up. This is my first time to raise poultry, though it's an idea I've had for quite some time. But with the local price of eggs here in Thailand only 10 cents each for medium chicken eggs, and 15 cents for jumbo duck eggs, it's hard to justify the expense and certainly not something that's going to be profitable if I end up buying commercial feed. So that's held me back till now. But with 8 medium to large size dogs to feed, I decided I'd rather spend the money on chicken feed than dog food, so I can transition to raw feeding and hopefully recoup some of the cost selling the eggcesse eggs (I like bad puns). So I decided it was time to get some domestic chicks.

I first built a small incubator out of an ice cooler and bought some eggs at the local fresh market to see if I could hatch them myself. After a few tries I gave up, they weren't fertile. All the local shops and vendors are apparently just reselling commercially produced eggs they buy at the central fresh market downtown.

So I bought some duck eggs from a table top display at a small outdoor restaurant I frequent, and tried hatching those. Unfortunately, I had recently added a fan to the incubator, and when I closed the vents for lockdown, the trapped heat from the fan motor drove the interior temp to over 40C. Failed again. Decided to do an eggtopsy to see what I was trying to hatch, expecting Khaki Campbells as they're pretty common here. Imagine my surprise to find dead drowned baby ducks with claws, and huge yolk sacks still not absorbed after 28 days... So unplug the fan and back to the restuarant for some more Muscovy eggs.... end of this month is the due date... Attempting to dry hatch this time, our relative humidity is always 25 to 35 percent. And waiting till day 30 to boost the humidity for hatching.

In the meantime....

I had built a small chicken (duck) tractor thinking I was hatching ducks, so I didn't need a perch or high roof line, but I needed access down top of the entire length of the tractor for the randomly placed eggs I expect to get eventually. I deliberately kept the height low enough to pass under the elevated drip irrigation lines in my garden, so I can use the Muscovies to weed between the raised beds, which will be used to grow small fruit trees. My next tractor will include an elevated section so the Muscovies can perch, assuming I ever get live birds.

In the meantime meantime...

While waiting for the eggs to hatch, I began to hear the cry of some roosters behind my land. My property is the last cleared area before the undeveloped area which sits between my homestead and the foothills of a mountain range which is protected from development and eventually abuts Thailand's largest national park. So I am literally living on the edge of undeveloped jungle. Since Thailand has had chickens for probably thousands of years, who are always allowed to run freey around their owner's properties, I assumed they were either recent escapees from one of my neighbors, or perhaps feral chickens coming down from the jungle. Either way, an opportunity to build a small flock of chickens if I could catch them, right? Not quite...

Last year, these same foothills were the site of a massive forrest fire which burned for several weeks. This has resulted in a huge swath of disturbed forest which has been regrowing for the last several months. It turns out this is the ideal environement for jungle fowl, which have seen a massive population explosion. By putting out some uncooked rice and getting them used to my presence, over the course of several weeks I successfully overcame their shy nature and lured them into my yard, and eventually into the empty dog pen waiting for them. I am now the proud owner of two red jungle fowl hens and one rooster. Since the middle of last month, I have been gifted with two 25 gram eggs a day for my trouble, with only a couple of days missed. I have almost a dozen in the incubator with the Muscovy eggs, all with the same due date. So I can also confirm, there is nothing unique about the ability of chickens to lay eggs daily, this ability comes naturally from their original wild cousins, and appears to be a result of collecting their eggs every day so they never get broody.

My other hobby is raising Dobermans, which means I will have to keep a careful separation between my future flocks and my pups. I also am growing mangoes and marian plums. In my marian plum orchard, about a kilometer from my homestead, there is separate flock of jungle fowl who have taken to roost in the fruit trees. The ones I captured on my homestead have red earings. The ones at the orchard have white earings, a different sub-species. I've started to scatter dry rice kernals around the (as yet) incomplete chicken tractor I placed in the middle of the orchard... I think you can see where this is going?

Maybe one day I'll get back to the idea of getting some domestic chickens, but for now, I have my hands full.

Welcome to the BYC forum. We are so Egg-cited you joined. You'll find invaluable learning information and experience interactive subjects. Look around and Learn all you can because you came to the Right place with some Very knowledgeable peeps on here
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@DobieLover has Dobies too!!
Stunning animals they are indeed.

 

[Thailander]

From my first attempts at hatching I only succeeded with one duckling and one chick. But the next round of chicks are due to hatch in less than a week, so the adventure continues, as I learn how to best regulate the temps and humidity for this tropical environment. More duck eggs are also in the incubator, but they'll take a few more weeks.

In the meantime, I'm measuring the growth rates of the my two birdies, and they couldn't be more different. The duckling has doubled in weight in 5 days, she's well on her way. The chick, on the other hand, has lost weight each day. I never see her eating. But she's energetic, happy, chirping away half the day. She doesn't huddle up under the heatlamp during the day, but wanders around her space. I'm thinking she's still absorbing nutrients from her internalized yolk sack? She's leaving poo behind, so something's going on... is this normal?

I got worried enough I took some of her mash and put it in a blender and made a thin gruel, which I then hand fed her with a small pipette. A small amount, to be sure, but if I can get her started she'll hopefully start eating on her own soon.

 

[Sammi_0411]

Hello from England

 

[Thailander]

Sadly, my first ittle chick never did learn to eat, and eventually died. I think she might have made it if she'd had any siblings to teach her how to scratch and peck, but on her own she failed to figure it out. Or had no appetite. I don't know.

My second attempt at hatching was much more successful. This new clutch is acting as you would expect, and growing by 6 to 10 percent or more each day. The problem with the incubator came down to the fan. Running all the time, it created too much heat during the hottest part of the day, causing the incubator to run over 39C. Disconnecting it, the temps in the incubator were too unpredictable, and caused big fluctuations. Rewiring the incubator so the fan only ran when the heater coils were activated was the solution that worked for me. Dry incubating was also beneficial, although I would add a small amount of water when I turned the eggs in the morning, by noon it had all evaporated and I would leave it run dry the rest of the day and night. This gave me a much improved air space at hatching time. Still, I had 2 of 6 malposition and pip at the wrong end. But with the guidance of the excellent notes on this site about assisting chicks to hatch, I am happy to say all the chicks survived and are now in the brooder. Newest batch in incubator is getting much more regular (manual) turning as well, at least 3x daily, so hopefully I'll have few malpositioning issues going forward (eggs are on their sides).

 

[Thailander]

Never a dull moment now that I've added poultry to my hobbies. One of the ducklings I hatched had a wonky spraddle leg, but seemed to be able to get around so I let him/her mix with the other siblings. Apparently, the leg gave out, I came home from a day trip yesterday to find it layinng next to the water feeder, completely soaked and unable to move, and shivering uncontrollably. If I hadn't come across it I'm sure it would have been dead in an hour.

Of course I rescued it, dried it off as best I could with a hand towel, and then cupped it with both my hands and a dry towel and held it on my lap while watching TV; It took a few hours before the shivering stopped, some was due to cold and some was due to fear.

Next I arranged a mini brooder for it, using a small round drink cooler barely larger in diameter than a two liter coke bottle. Separately, I stuck a tiny bowl of water on top of the upside down cap of a spray paint can and suspended some ground up feed in the water, so the duckling could drink and filter feed at the same time.. I put that in a separate tupperware size box where I could hold the duckling upright (it was now too weak to stand) and let the duckling drink/eat for 5/10 minutes, which it did eagerly. I've been repeating the process every couple hours, it's eating better and better each time, and is strong enough to stand briefly on its own now. I also added a rubber band leg brace (like the small rubber bands used to hold a pony tail). At first I put it around it's leg just above its rear claw,, gave it a couple twists, then slipped it around the second leg, again above it's back claw, but now I've moved it up higher to above it's hocks. I'll keep holding it upright while its feeding (it still has balancing issues though its getting better) and hope that the spraddle issue resolves in a few days. With 12 other ducklings in the brooder, it wouldn't be the end of the world it it didn't survive, but I'm hopeful it will as its a real fighter with a strong appetite. Of course I'll have to name it Phoenix.