I've lurked on this website for a few years now, reading all the great advice and learning so many new things about raising chickens and other birds that I was embarrassed to have ever talked like I was an authority on chickens to my coworkers. I figured now that I was officially incubating a batch of eggs that it was about time I finally made a real account on here and contributed to the general chatter. Since this is an introduction, however, I suppose I should start with a little about myself.
I'm a college student, first off, so I have low funds and enthusiasm is about all I have going for me. I live in the Provo/Orem/American Fork of Utah just south of Salt Lake city where my parents are kindly letting me continue living with them so long as I am attending classes and helping pay some of the bills. They also have a half-acre of land that we keep chickens and, on some occasions, ducks on. My first chicken, and by that I mean the first chicken I bought and raised, was a silver laced wyandotte named broody. No matter what we did we could not get her to stop being broody for more than a week or two unless it was winter. I didn't really get the barnyard fowl bug until I hatched my first clutch of California Quail eggs though.
The whole thing was a bit of a rushed job, an emergency even, that led me to incubating the tiny eggs. We had a female quail nesting in out side yarn against a fence post under a hollow of tall grass weeds. We checked on her every day to make sure none of our cats had gotten her, we have three who roam in and out of the house, but we didn't want to disturb her since she was a wild bird. Then one day we came to check on her and instead of the female huddling over the eggs, the male was in her place and strewn around them were the bloody brown feathers of the female quail; we later found her body next to the raccoon hole at the end of the field.
We were set to keep an even more vigilant watch on the male, going so far as to set up a raccoon trap near the nest so they'd stay away but a week later we were again met with bloody feathers, this time the body gone entirely. Well, I say we but when the male was killed it was six in the morning and my mother was the one who discovered it. Thankfully it was a weekend, so there were no classes I had to worry for, but being woken by your mother so early frantically shouting for your help isn't something I can say I enjoyed. She'd gathered the entire thing, nest and all, into an empty ice cream bucket and brought them inside. At the time we didn't have an incubator, we'd not even talked about incubating anything before, but she gently shoved that bucket of eggs into my arms and demanded I find a way to save them.
To be honest I was fairly certain they were dead. It had rained heavily the night before and without the male to protect them they'd probably frozen or drowned. They were laid in what was essentially a ditch after all. They were also fairly cold by that point, almost the same temperature of eggs from the fridge, but I wasn't about to tell my mother no when she looked so upset about the whole thing. So, since we'd just put the new baby ducks out and I had all the heat lamps and tanks in my room still, I set the bucket in the tank, turned on the lamp, put the digital thermometer usually used in our sun oven on top of the eggs and hopped on BYC to check for any advice on how to handle quail eggs.
Now, we knew they were at least two weeks and some days old because that is when we nearly ran them down with the weed whacker. Following the advice I found on here, I set a cup of water in under the heat lamp to try and provide at least a little humidity and turned the eggs for a few more days then left them to sit. I had no way of measuring humidity, the temperature read out was sometimes a little suspect, and I had no idea what I was looking for when it came to candling, but of the 16 eggs my mother rescued 7 hatched out. We had 2 die in the first day, despite our best efforts, because they were just too weak after everything they'd gone through in the egg; another two ended up escaping during their first outing into the back yard and I like to think they're raising families of their own. The last three we kept until they were adults when their noises drew another covey to them and we released them back into the wild with a wild family to teach them how to survive.
By then, however, it was too late. I had been bitten and the urge to incubate my own eggs and raise my own chickens was too strong. I can't have roosters here, it's against city laws, but the city over allows them so I've acquired a dozen silkie eggs and am on day 4 of their incubation. I'm so excited and I hope everyone is willing to put up with my first timer's questions and ignorance long enough for me to become an old pro at it!
I'm a college student, first off, so I have low funds and enthusiasm is about all I have going for me. I live in the Provo/Orem/American Fork of Utah just south of Salt Lake city where my parents are kindly letting me continue living with them so long as I am attending classes and helping pay some of the bills. They also have a half-acre of land that we keep chickens and, on some occasions, ducks on. My first chicken, and by that I mean the first chicken I bought and raised, was a silver laced wyandotte named broody. No matter what we did we could not get her to stop being broody for more than a week or two unless it was winter. I didn't really get the barnyard fowl bug until I hatched my first clutch of California Quail eggs though.
The whole thing was a bit of a rushed job, an emergency even, that led me to incubating the tiny eggs. We had a female quail nesting in out side yarn against a fence post under a hollow of tall grass weeds. We checked on her every day to make sure none of our cats had gotten her, we have three who roam in and out of the house, but we didn't want to disturb her since she was a wild bird. Then one day we came to check on her and instead of the female huddling over the eggs, the male was in her place and strewn around them were the bloody brown feathers of the female quail; we later found her body next to the raccoon hole at the end of the field.
We were set to keep an even more vigilant watch on the male, going so far as to set up a raccoon trap near the nest so they'd stay away but a week later we were again met with bloody feathers, this time the body gone entirely. Well, I say we but when the male was killed it was six in the morning and my mother was the one who discovered it. Thankfully it was a weekend, so there were no classes I had to worry for, but being woken by your mother so early frantically shouting for your help isn't something I can say I enjoyed. She'd gathered the entire thing, nest and all, into an empty ice cream bucket and brought them inside. At the time we didn't have an incubator, we'd not even talked about incubating anything before, but she gently shoved that bucket of eggs into my arms and demanded I find a way to save them.
To be honest I was fairly certain they were dead. It had rained heavily the night before and without the male to protect them they'd probably frozen or drowned. They were laid in what was essentially a ditch after all. They were also fairly cold by that point, almost the same temperature of eggs from the fridge, but I wasn't about to tell my mother no when she looked so upset about the whole thing. So, since we'd just put the new baby ducks out and I had all the heat lamps and tanks in my room still, I set the bucket in the tank, turned on the lamp, put the digital thermometer usually used in our sun oven on top of the eggs and hopped on BYC to check for any advice on how to handle quail eggs.
Now, we knew they were at least two weeks and some days old because that is when we nearly ran them down with the weed whacker. Following the advice I found on here, I set a cup of water in under the heat lamp to try and provide at least a little humidity and turned the eggs for a few more days then left them to sit. I had no way of measuring humidity, the temperature read out was sometimes a little suspect, and I had no idea what I was looking for when it came to candling, but of the 16 eggs my mother rescued 7 hatched out. We had 2 die in the first day, despite our best efforts, because they were just too weak after everything they'd gone through in the egg; another two ended up escaping during their first outing into the back yard and I like to think they're raising families of their own. The last three we kept until they were adults when their noises drew another covey to them and we released them back into the wild with a wild family to teach them how to survive.
By then, however, it was too late. I had been bitten and the urge to incubate my own eggs and raise my own chickens was too strong. I can't have roosters here, it's against city laws, but the city over allows them so I've acquired a dozen silkie eggs and am on day 4 of their incubation. I'm so excited and I hope everyone is willing to put up with my first timer's questions and ignorance long enough for me to become an old pro at it!
and Welcome To BYC! What a story! Good luck with your new hatch!
