Found my first chick "riding the rails" this afternoon... sheesh... I have eggs due to go into lockdown tonite and I went to check the humidity and there's a little Easter Egger chick wandering around on the opposite side of the bator from where it hatched, what??? And it was almost dry, too!!
I'm still trying to figure out what happened, I went and looked at the calendar, AGAIN, counted, AGAIN and they are due for lockdown today,
weird...
The only thing I can figure is I had a small hatch last week (thursday) and those were from eggs that had been under broodies that flaked out on me, so I put them in the bator just in case, some of course quit, but 2 chicks ended up hatching... then I set a bigger group the week after that (the ones due for lockdown tonite)... so is it possible that I somehow mislabeled one of those that had been under a broody, it had started developing, I put it in with the next group and then it finished and hatched this much earlier?? Seems like they aren't that hardy, so hmmmmmm