Can you answer my incubator question Olive?
I bet we were posting at the same time but here you go!
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Start counting the second day. So if you set on the 11th, you would could the 12th as day "one" because it marks the point at which they had been incubated for 1 day, 24 hours. I put mine in lockdown early because they consistently hatch early you won't know if that's the case for yours until you get a couple hatches under your belt though.
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Nope, no bator running here right now. I've got turkey eggs collecting on the counter for it, but nothing in right now. I have had the power go out during incubation before though. It wouldn't have been a big deal if I had remembered they were in there as we have backup power, but I forgot and didn't get them set up. They went without power for 8 hours, I think it was. Got down into the 80s in the bator. It reduced the hatch rate, but quite a few still hatched. I was impressed.
As for the efficacy of the natural wormers. I have never had birds FEC'd, but I have run FECs on other animals here and have never had a problem. The reason I don't run FECs on chickens is a bit twofold. 1) They don't stay here long enough for it to be worthwhile. 18 months is about the maximum I keep them around and more importantly 2) chickens don't contract all of the same parasites that you would find in mammals and the ones they do get affect them in different ways, they are, generally speaking, more prone to be symptomatic with a smaller load, whereas in larger mammals you can have significant parasite loads that remain asymptomatic. IOW, with chickens 'what you see is what you get' is more likely to be true so if you're observing your birds thoroughly on a regular basis you're less likely to have things get out of hand if one should have an issue.
Another thing to keep in mind is that even the routine worming of animals that can and do carry large loads asymptomatically has come under scrutiny in recent years as being not just ineffective, but detrimental overall. Routine use of wormers has been shown, in horses for instance, to contribute to the rather rapid development of resistant strains of parasites on farms. And the routine schedules often given out have zero basis in what we now know about how the wormers work and how the parasites respond to them. And then there is the whole issue of wormers that have known resistance issues in most locales still being used and touted. But that would be a novel all it's own, so I'll just say do your homework and decide from there what's best for your flock.
