Hello. Well mine chicken tale starts when my husband brought home a free coop with 5 hens and 4 Roosters. We soon discovered we had too many Roosters and ate the other 3. We lost 2 in the woods....snake bit or hog we don't know. Anyway they started laying not too long after that. We discovered that we have 1 broody hen from the original 5 hens. (we are down to 2 original hens, one which we call Broody Hen, the other is Momma hen because she is the momma of our Rooster) She hatched us 5 on Easter weekend. That's when the chicken fever hit. The Girls and I went to Tractor Supply and bought 10 production reds and 2 white. But that wasn't enough, I wanted a little more variety. So the next week we went to the feed store and bought 7 Americana's and 2 Browns ones. Broody hen tried to set up again not long after that and a rat snake got into the hen house and ate 2 eggs...we then separated her in her own big box in the barn, but the damage was already done, she had been off the eggs too long and none of them made it. She started brooding again in late May/early June and a rat snake got 1 of those eggs, but this time my husband got there in time to blow it's head off.....she had 7 left she was laying on. She hatched 3....the 4th had started, but didn't seem to be getting anywhere after about 8-10 hours....so I brought it in and we peeled away the shell and she was all dry inside. We helped her out and she was very lethargic. So we got a non-used gas dropper for babies and started giving her drops of water......she made it/or he. She had 3 eggs left, one of which had a crack at the wrong end and a little blood. We started to peel and saw more blood so we stopped and put that egg in with the other 4 hatched chicks and the next morning he was coming out of his shell on his own. So we hatched 5. No as if I already didn't have chicken fever, it got worse so I bought an incubator. Needless to say that is not going well and all. I have not hatched any chicks and when they are past their due date by at least 2 days and we have candled them, we crack them open to see development.. They all started to develop some more than others. Any ideas on what happened here. We did have a few bad eggs we took out because it was starting to smell and I'm thinking the gas fumes might have killed some. Also a lot of my eggs from my momma hen are greenish brown and you latterly cannot see through the shell. Well now Broody hen is broody again and is laying on 4 eggs and I ceramic, which I intend to take away today and give her 2 good eggs instead. All our other hens are doing good. We are getting ready to get rid of 2 Roosters, because from our original 5 around Easter, we got 4 roosters and only 1 hen. Our 2nd batch is a little over a month and we are not sure what we have yet. I've got the bug bad, just ordered 25 Buff Orffington's and 2 Guinea's to be shipped next week. I think I'm done for the year after those arrive. I don't know if I will ever get any hatched from the incubator. I have some now that I just candled this morning and next week I should have at least 3 because I still see active movement. The greenish/brown eggs I just cannot tell.
Any suggestions would be helpful. I think there might have been a temperature spike and maybe that's why they didn't make it.
Any suggestions would be helpful. I think there might have been a temperature spike and maybe that's why they didn't make it.
