My first attempt at hatching

[DonyaQuick]

Here we go...I just put a batch of (hopefully) fertile eggs under my little broody Dimple yesterday evening, so I'm starting this thread to track how it goes! My hens are buff orpingtons and my roo is barred rock.

It was recommended I do 6, but ultimately I decided to start with 8 since apparently Dimple's underside is actually a portal to another dimension that can fit infinitely many objects. I just wasn't seeing a great rate of obvious fertility in eggs I'm cooking with when looking for the white bullseye pattern. Unless that changed quite recently I'm likely to have more than a couple duds that I need to remove. Since I'm expecting duds and don't want any exploding egg events, I gather I need to candle in about 5 days. Before I moved this hen to a dedicated broody setup, she would wait until I was in the enclosure to run out to eat so that she could also jump up on my shoulder to say hi briefly before running back to her nest; she's so friendly and used to me that I'm not too worried about a candling intervention or two disrupting her broodiness.

 

[DonyaQuick]

I took an early sneak peek with my candling light. I can clearly see 2 fertile ones with some development; those are my lightest shelled eggs (they're a very light pinkish hue). There is a little pulsing dot with vascular structure starting to fan out from it. So I've got at least 2! Hopefully a few more will show up later since I know it's really too early to know much. I was just really hoping to see anything at all really, and I did so I'm happy with that!

Can't see much in the other eggs. For my 3 darkest eggs I can't see air sacks or even a darker area where the yolk is. I guess they are dark and/or thick shelled enough that I might have a challenge judging what's goin on with those until it's a lot farther into the process. I've seen in tutorial videos that the best thing for me to look for will be an air cell getting more clear in those.

Dimple is currently getting a dust bath between my sad looking lettuce and beets.

EDIT: just after I originally posted, Dimple unloaded a quantity of poop that rivals what my 70lb dog produces. I guess she just stubbornly refuses to do her business in the house, so I will have to take her outside daily. She didn't want to dust bath in the house either even though she's done that in the past.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Hmm...where did Dimple go?

 

[DonyaQuick]

Well yesterday evening was...eventful lol. I think this picture pretty much captures how Dimple was doing. She reaaaally needed a nap after managing 3 bouncy kids that wanted to run around and one newly hached chick that needed to stay under her.

And eventually she took a nap...and broody pooped in the nest in her sleep. That of course woke her up and sent her into uh-oh mode trying to figure out what to do. Fortunately she it didn't get on any of the chicks, but I had to take them and her out of there and clean it up.

This morning has also made me realize that having a super friendly broody is going to be an awesome cheat for having friendly chicks. I thought it was going to be the other way around and I'd have to work harder to earn the chicks' trust later on since Dimple is the mama rather than me. However, now that they're all hatched she just brings them to me and encourages them to climb on me to come have a group hug.

Still got that one brown egg in the incubator looking promising. I've turned off the auto rotator and will keep checking it. Maybe I'll get lucky and it'll just be a few days behind and I can still sneak it into the group with the others.

EDIT: oh, I forgot - chick #4 is doing good today!

 

[nchls school]

Good luck!

 

[DonyaQuick]

Broody Dimple says hi!

Eggs are on day 7 now. After a lot of searching, I've now seen some pictures of other buff orpington eggs that seem as hard to candle as mine, at least to my novice eyes. I've even tried in a pitch black closet now and it doesn't help one bit. I wish I had extra hands to take a picture and post here; the shell has too much dense speckle patterning that shows up when lit, so it really obscures everything. I guess I will just have to rely on the sniff test for catching any that are going bad, which hopefully Dimple would catch first and kick out of the bunch; otherwise I think I just have leave them all. One of the light eggs still looks at least a few days of development ahead of the others - pretty weird.

Dimple is becoming uninterested in the regular all flock feed and is increasingly wanting whole grains and bugs for her outings. Not sure how much of that is down to her being a treat fiend vs broody needs.

 

[DonyaQuick]

I knew thing were going to happen early! Day 20 and...

It looks almost white?? Wasn't expecting that from buff x barred but I also don't know much of chick colors.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Couldn't resist another candling peek since Dimple seems totally ok with me having a look and I have not watched the development stages before (she gets treats in return for being bothered and seems happy). I have 8 eggs from 4 hens under her.

Chungus: 3 eggs since I had significant fertility doubts for hers (never seen her mate!) but also really want a chick or two from her if I can get it. Hers are the dark, difficult eggs. Today it looks like 1 probably developing, 1 maybe but hard to tell still, and probably a solid dud but I will give it time.

Buddy and Dingus: 2 each (4 total), all showing some clear development. The Buddy eggs were a high certainty; kind of surprised in the Dingus ones.

Cuddles: she was the hen I lost recently and also stopped laying some time before that. The day I was picking eggs I found one last egg of hers that I had missed in my cooking egg backlog. It is old and odds are very poor because of that. It is also dark but the air cell absolutely looks different today. Anyway, I'm not holding out great hope for this one but thought I'd see what it does, if anything.

 

[DonyaQuick]

Well, I am back to not being able to tell what's going on in those dark eggs. Part of the problem is I don't have long to candle during Dimple's little outings and don't feel comfortable bumbling around in a dark room with an egg I don't want to break.

Two dark eggs show an air cell that appears to be changing gradually. The yolk is a barely visible mass that I think has a darker area on it. Good sign??

My most pressing matter I guess is this: for the other two dark eggs, at what point am I playing exploding egg roulette by leaving them be if they are duds?

The light eggs are beautiful to watch develop although one seems way further along than the others. I'm not sure how that could have happened since all were collected right after being laid and we're stored in the same place, set the same time, etc.

 

[ihatedarkroast]

My first time doing this was a month ago. I found that with the tricky dark eggs, I had a higher fertility rate than I thought. So I cracked open one that I thought was empty and...it wasn't. ;_; After 10 days it was more obvious which ones had stalled during development. I had 0 explosions even after the chicks had mostly hatched. No smelly eggs at all among the failures. So try to hold out as long as you can and let mama henny do her thing.