May 2020 Hatch-A-Long

[SueT]

Moonshine w her 7 hatched Tues and Wed

And the 8 in the incubator batch, hatched one week earlier. All chicks are from the same parents, 5 are Spitzhauben and 10 are 'Sprights' the Spitz-Sebright cross.

 

[FortCluck]

I don’t think I shared this yet. My father built this fort at my parents house for the boys to play... Well now they’re too old to play on it so it’s coming to the farm to be converted into a coop I cannot wait to see the magic happen.

 

[chickiebaby1]

all my eggs look good. My polish is now not fertile this chicken will be the cause of all my headaches. So 6 of her eggs got pulled and 1 stayed because it was fertile.

The bantam Brahma eggs look amazing.

Squatch’s offspring Spook and Wednesday have 12 fertile eggs in the bator. They were mated with Deathlayers (the brothers of mine) The colors should be amazing!

I've noticed that with my 2 polish girls. I don't think one of them lets the rooster near her. She is kind of a loner anyway even with the other girls. But anytime I have set the polish eggs 1/2 are fertile and 1/2 are not...….

 

[FortCluck]

I've noticed that with my 2 polish girls. I don't think one of them lets the rooster near her. She is kind of a loner anyway even with the other girls. But anytime I have set the polish eggs 1/2 are fertile and 1/2 are not...….

So you have the same issue as me This Polish has pretty chicks but hard to get them when the eggs aren’t fertile half the time.

 

[Mvan42]

Eeeek, my incubator was at 103, this morning... not sure how long it was like that. I forgot to check water levels... added water cooled it down all is good. I hope they are ok. Candled yesterday a lot of what looks to be infertile but waiting for next week to be for sure.


Looks is like my rooster (just gave him away). Was only breeding certain hens... lad hatch I had a lot of infertile eggs also.

 

[kelseyk]

Woke up to 3 Golden Appenzellers hatched and 3 more hatched within an hour of me checking on them. 2 more pipped and waiting on 3.

 

[kelseyk]

So batch 3 is mostly over. 3 lone eggs in the incubator that I will look at after lunch. 8 out of 11 hatched.

And interesting observation from these hatches. Besides having 5 days between hatches I noticed something that makes me wonder.

1st hatch, the rooster was over-mating the hens and 90 percent of the CCL hatch were female.

2nd hatch, I had removed the rooster to give the hens a break, 85 percent of the CCL hatch were male.

3rd hatch, rooster was back in the pen and better behaved, 100 percent of CCL hatch was female.

This pen has 3 hens to one rooster and when collecting for the 3rd hatch, the pen only had 2 hens due to rooster injuring one of the females. She has since recovered but freaks out anytime a bigger bird approaches her. I like her because she is a golden creole and she lays the largest blue eggs. Sadly, I do think she might find being in with the layers less stressful.

Anyway, this oddity was easy to pick up with an auto-sexing breed, so I plan to try it again a few times to see if I can get a repeat of the data so far. I do have one more hatch with 2 CCL eggs in it and the Rooster was still out of the pen, but next to the pen [ they shared a common wire wall ] so we'll see what happens with those 2 eggs.

That is interesting!

 

[TurkenMomma]

Well, what do you all think? It just pipped a few hours ago?

 

[CindyinSD]

Shes in to the third week so she seems commited, she just seems to forget where the nest is because she makes panicy noises when shes off them over half hour but if you show her the nest she clucks and grumbles like you tried to hide it from her.
As i pointed out earlier in the thread, brahmas are lovely sweet docile birds......... just a bit thick as well

Maybe she needs her own little broody coop/run?

 

[Tbjenkins2007]

Day 21 for incubator 1 with my turkeys. They have one more week! Had 14 with 1 dud at last candling. So we shall see!

Day 15 for incubator 2 with chickens. Started with 36 eggs. Over all I pulled 6 duds last week, and there were a total of 2 quitters. So I’ll be going in to lockdown with 28!

Incubator 3 is on 12 but we started with 36 and had 8 duds in there and 2 quitters. I’ll candle them one more time on day 15 or 16 before lockdown.

A lot of my chicken eggs came from neighbors. I know all of mine are usually fertile but I’m trying to broaden my brood and have a variety.

And my kitty incubator has About 2 weeks going by her last heat cycle. And it will be a surprise how many are incubating. My guess is 1-3