***JULY HATCH-A-LONG come join in***

[missred871]

HOLY COW! I had an interesting day, here we are on day 14 or 15ish and getting ready for lockdown I pulled out two more turner racks, well. I was putting the eggs down in the bator and I find out one of them has pipped early! ECK! PS I am hatching quail lol. One of my farm mixed corts was pipped. I thought for sure he would be a goner but I left him in the bator, got home from work at midnight.


GUESS WHAT?! One of our buttons had pipped and i could see it sticking its little beak out! SOOOOOO FREAKING AWESOME! I was upset that they started early though I know that the temos got a wee bit on the high side for a few days so I am thinking we are lucky if we get a 25% hatch this time round, but this is my first go at the bator thing.

Well out of the little pip from earlier in the day I saw nothing, until the button hatch and then POOF there comes the other one that pipped WAY earlier today. Then I go back a few minutes later and another has zipped! I am soooooooo excited! I hope we get a few more that are in such good shape. No problems to be seen so far with the hatched ones. Here are some bator pics, I DID NOT OPEN THE BATOR, some of these look like I did but I took the pics through the windows.

SO excited!

 

[featherz]

ooo those are so cute!!!


Well, my hatch is officially done. I had two deaths from shrinkwrap - one prior to lockdown and one after due to my opening the bator. I'll have to use one of the humidity tricks next time to avoid this - I had 5 more chicks with shrinkwrap and those I did assist. They appear to be perfectly formed, absorbed yolk, etc - all parts (so far) where they should be - and they are all fine as far as I can tell. I could not leave the keets in for the whole hatch since it took 5 days. Keets seem MUCH more crazy than chicks - any advice for next time? Should I use egg cartons to hatch out of? The minute they are born they go careening around screeching non stop! (Plus they start pecking at the eggs)..


I made a 'chick icu' last night for two I intervened on - I peeled off just the face portion of the membrane and wrapped the egg in wet paper towels and put them in a 4-segmented eggcarton in the incubator so HOPEFULLY the other keets would not bite them/kick them out of the egg (they still had a bit of vein showing so I didn't want any bleeding out). In the morning both were out of the egg and out of the carton. YAY.

My final tally (have to eggtopsy the 6 remaining eggs): 36 eggs, 7 tossed halfway through (infertile), 21 (!!!) hatched, 2 dead from apparent shrinkwrap and six are non pippers/unknown. Not bad at all for a first try!

Today is day 28, the 'official' hatch day (lol). Should I keep the other six eggs in the bator if I hear no peeps or tapping? My gut is that they are no good, but candling doesn't work on these for me.

UPDATE: Opened the last 6 eggs. Three of them were white guineas, two were non starters and one had a black goo in the membrane and no way was I checking that! The white guineas were fully formed, not shrinkwrapped and definitely dead. Not sure why ALL of the whites never hatched, but I guess it's better that way. With so many of the others hatching, I'm thinking it's the guinea parents.

 

[missred871]

Quote:
I have no keet advice tho the egg cartons are always a good idea. I didnt have any for this hatch unfortunately. However with all these early hatchers who needs em LMAO. I have about 3 more pips tonight as well. I have a spray bottle handy i had to open the bator and get ride of the empty egg shells from my 3 hatchees since they have a sHUGE sponge in there and there are still two turner racks in there for the other eggs which are two days behind them. I am thinking I might have to go into lockdown early since these hatched early the others might too. The little yellow baby is the button it is sooooo itty bitty, my first button baby lol. I got the parents when they were half grown. i am excited lol. Sad when you pin all ur hopes on eggs hatching LMAO

 

[Cattitude]

I always *love* to see baby pictures!

I'm going to have to try the egg carton thing, too. I don't have many eggs on the next hatch, so I'm going to prepare a carton and see how it goes. Right now I have 33 eggs in the second incubator that I'm using as a hatcher, and 5 guinea eggs plus a dozen d'Uccle eggs in the first incubator. Tuesday the 13th is Day 21 for the 33 eggs and I'm chewing my nails and keeping myself busy so I'm not tempted to go look every 30 minutes.

Congratz on your hatches, and I'm looking forward to seeing more chick pictures soon!!

P.S. I'm going to have to get some quail just to have those awesome looking eggs!

 

[featherz]

I just realized my hatch percentage might be greater than I had originally thought - the nice people who sent me the guinea eggs said they put in eggs from lavender, pearl and white guineas. I have NO white guineas in my 21 hatched keets. So possibly the seven (or a portion thereof) I tossed for non starters were infertile eggs from the whites, making my percentage 21/29. Not bad for a newbie with shipped eggs! I wrote them to ask if they remembered how many eggs from the white guinea were in the box just for giggles. I didn't even think to check for bullseyes, etc, just cracked them to make sure they were clears and tossed em.

I still have the other six eggs in the bator until my last two keets dry out just for giggles. Hopefully there's no stink bombs waiting to happen. I put them in eggcartons to help protect them from those keets.

(the thermometer says 80 because I threw it in just before taking the pic.. and that's my homemade nipple waterer which they are using just fine!).

OMG check this picture out! I just went in to check how my two last 'shrinky dink' chicks were doing. They are in the bator still with the unhatched eggs - the eggs I don't have much if any hope for so I open the incubator when needed.. Is this cute or what?

 

[Kedreeva]

Man, everyone has such cute babies! I haven't seen keet babies before, they sure are adorable. I know chicken babies just want to lay around and sleep for the first two days, no zooming! Must be hard to catch them to get them out!

Grats to all on their hatches! Will post some pictures soon!

 

[CaitlynNichols]

We set our eggs June 25 and now we are officially in lockdown mode. They should be due July 16. Woopie!
There are 12 eggs in total and we expect 10 out of 12 of them to hatch since we candled them recently and found most of them to have our precious chicks inside.

They are going to be cross breeds with a New Hampshire Red (buff) with an Americauana and NH with a Buff Brahma.

 

[flgardengirl]

The keets are such cutie pies. I know they are psychos!! I have 5 keets that are about 2 mos old now. OMG they spaz at the slightest little thing. I put them in with some chicks thier age to try to get them to ask more chickenish. Haha they still 'spaz out' a lot and the chickens all look at them like , "Hey, what is your malfunction?" lol.

 

[featherz]

I am adding in 6, day old chicks with the keets today - I keep hearing it may calm them down. Hahahah. They run with their tiny little wings out like WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

 

[Mrs. K]

A bit of a wreck??

For the first time, I caught one of my broodies off the nest. She had an egg stuck to her, and when I looked at the nest, it looks like two eggs broke. A mess everywhere, and even a couple of maggots. Ugh! and smell.

So while she was out and about, I pulled the eggs off, pulled out the nesting material, put in new nesting material. Then I wiped with my hands the worst off the eggs. I dropped one, and that had a blood spot, so at least they should be growing.

But try as I might, it did not clean the eggs up too good, I used a bit of hay, but even so. So I went to the house and got a warm rag. Now I didn't scrub the eggs, they are still not perfectly clean, but I did get the big chunks of yolk off of them. Some eggs were not too bad, and a couple of eggs were covered.

I waited before I left and Butter went back in and settled down on her 'cleaner' clutch.

Was this a good thing to do or not?

I did check Sunshine, she did not get off, but she does not peck me either, so I just lifted her up, and hers look ok.

mrsk