INCUBATING w/FRIENDS! w/Sally Sunshine Shipped Eggs No problem!

[lindalouly]

 Hiya...great to see you up & at 'um

I'm up... But not quite at em yet. Lol morning my whites. Xoxoxo

 

[lindalouly]

The wind is moving strong. This will be a great test of my fencing abilities. Fingers crossed.

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

Quote: But I miss your face!!!!! So does MC, she said so!!!!

May I ask what this thread is for? Jk! I am learning so much about well why they made this website. So those special people who love chickens can exspress their crazy.

It's for talking about incubating and hatching, including building incubators, or setting them up/calibrating them, and helping out and sharing all the things that go along with it. But sometimes it might not seem so because it's also a group of folks who chat about a lot of other stuff in between. It can be a little hard to keep up, but they are SUPER helpful if you've never hatched before (or even if you have!)

Hi all----my chickies need help!
This is my first hatch and I am on day 23. One hatched day 21 and 3 more hatched out. My problem is that the chicks aren't fluffing out. They are dry but crusty and have bits of shell stuck to them! I know now by reading previous posts my humidity in incubator was set too high. (I followed incubator directions!) But what do I do for my little chicks now? I am tempted to wash them off! How can they stay warm in a brooder if they don't fluff out?

I see you got a good answer from Sally. I had this issue with one of my recent hatches with sticky chicks. I'll only add that I did what Tao chick recommended and microwaved a wet washcloth, let it cool just enough not to burn (so water was warm), and wiped the chick as much as I could until the washcloth started to get cool, then put the chick back in the incubator to warm back up and dry a bit. It took two or three "baths" like this to get it all off, but I didn't want to chill the chick. Sally's idea is probably more efficient, but I wasn't convinced that I could avoid drowning the chick (being a little bit of a Klutz sometimes).

Just finished baking some spelt bread. I was actually worried about making it because if we don't like it it gets thrown to the chickens, but I was very surprised. The outside is lovely, crisp like French baguettes. The inside is almost cloudlike, just perfectly textured. If you guys ever get the chance to bake fresh bread, try spelt because it's definitely going to be our stock bread in this house.

I totally need to try this! I got a grain mill that attaches to my stand mixer, I can get some spelt berries (if I can't find flour). May I ask your recipe?

Gonna be one of those days. Went to bed feeling fairly productive. Set up outside brooder for my 19 mixed 5 wk olds, cleaned indoor brooder and set up for my week olds, set up incubator and put the shipped eggs in, cleaned big coop and changed out bedding/dusted nest boxes, and other randomness that I'm forgetting about.

Woke up this morning and the incubator didn't come back up to temp. Hasn't been above 95. I'm using a different thermometer but not sure if I trust it. The STC thermostat is set to 100. Actually I mixed things up quite a bit this go around so we will see how it goes. If temp is still down this afternoon I will tinker with it

Walked outside and the closer I got to the brooder pen the uglier it got. Fresh dirt on both ends. Rough guess is something got about half of them. Seemed like it was secure but dosent look like 1/2" hardware cloth is going to work. Didn't tear it loose or get through it but somehow managed to get at least some of the birds out. 3 dead in pen mangled and 2 injured but still alive and eating and drinking.

Plan forward is to move the brooder pen into my shed and hope that goes better.

Ehhh. Getting really tired of this part of it.

Quote:

This freaked me out - did you either bury the HW cloth 1 foot down or do an apron all around? I try to have an apron of at least 2 feet all around (since I can't dig down because of rocks). PLEASE let us know what it was if you did, so we can learn and make our own chickees safer! I vote for rat (unless the scat looks too large) - I live in fear of rats getting to my birds (esp. little ones) and try to make my coops as airtight as possible. (Edit: Well, not airtight, but you know what I mean...)

(Maybe I'll go get 1/4" HW cloth... but that's so expensive!)

Quote: Very good idea. I can't do this today (too much I have to get done), but if no one does this today, I can take a stab at this next week.

Productive day yesterday, set up the new paddock for the Cream Legbar trio - their coop is quite large for only three, but they really like foraging, so their relief to get out on ground was palpable - made me very happy to get that accomplished. Then between chicken chores (washing waterers with soap , etc.), I worked on prepping lumber for the tractor coops I'm building (need to sand and seal the lumber).

I've got more lumber work today - fortunately it is a bit overcast, as I inadvertently got sunburned yesterday (!). I also have hours and hours of grading to do before Monday - I'll do that during breaks. (And I have to find time to clean the brooders somewhere in there...)

- Ant Farm

 

[lindalouly]

How many votes is that now for missing whites face?

 

[Sally Sunshine]

 

[Sally Sunshine]

The wind is moving strong. This will be a great test of my fencing abilities. Fingers crossed.

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

@Sally Sunshine - first of all, good to see you!

Also, I just remembered (I mentioned it before) - the Cream Legbars were on Rooster Booster Multiwormer (with Hygromycin B) when I was collecting their eggs (remember that Dumbledore was injured and I had not been expecting to collect eggs).

With regard to your other info you were putting together on birth defects and the various wormers, all of the chicks are totally normal and fine at 2.5 weeks, from what I can tell. There was that unusually high percentage of malpositioned chicks, but there were so many other things (including round eggs and questions about the R-Com incubator) that I would question whether there was an association with the wormer (not even sure that would be the type of effect one would see).

I couldn't remember where you were keeping that info...

OK, off to get to work. Just didn't want to forget that.

- Ant Farm

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

I LOVE your Cream Legbars. they look great! And was that a Lavender Ameraucana I saw in there? I have some of those coming this spring...

OK, really going to work now, I promise!

- Ant Farm

 

[mlm Mike]

Quote: Leap Year Baby AWESOME!

Quote:
Sunna will be 4 in April.
and Moose?
He is 5, will be 6 Dec. 30th.

Clover is 1, she will be 2 Dec. 31st.

thinking about clovers now lol St. Patty day soon

 

[kwhites634]

@Sally Sunshine
No clue how to quote from multiple posts, & didn't want to quote your entire novel, so here goes:

Didn't you see the pipe that was added in the rooster's beak? That was added last night by someone who knows Photoshop ( I'd give 'em credit, but I'm terrible with new userid's) I think it's pretty cool.

I see you're back to the color avatar today...much better than the 'washed out' b/w. I need to grab Mr. Rooster & get someone to snap a pic of me holding him; I'm terrible with selfies...can't see where I'm shooting w/my camera, & can't hook the phone up to the 'puter.

I'd be glad to work on alphabetizing the hatchers list if I knew how. I see where Ant Farm has it covered, though.

I'm sure I missed something in all that