Set 8 Eggs In Brinsea Mini Advance Today 9/13/11. Wanna Join?

[CSisley]

Henmad – I’m so glad you found her some buddies!

Cielo - Well at least you didn't crack open live eggs! That's been my dilemma lately. I've got two that I'm 95% sure they are no good but I know I would feel terrible if I cracked them open and found that I had made a mistake. I think they started developing and then stopped. I'm going to give them just a few more days, maybe try the float test on them!

7 days left on the countdown update:
Four out of the six eggs left I can see movement but today I saw an actual foot!!!! I never imagined I would actually be able to see that much detail but boy was I excited when I did!

 

[cielo]

Csisley- You saw a foot?! That's so cool. A baby chicken foot... I am very glad there were no chicks in those eggs I discarded. I was pretty sure but eh, that would have been terrible. This has been a great learning experience for me.

I took out my turner, filled both the water trays, added traction over the wire and put my egg in a cut down carton for lockdown. My egg should hatch this weekend. Well, it maybe won't but 21 days after the 10th is October 1st. If there is a chick in there it'll be getting ready. If it's alive it may hatch. I wonder if I'll be able to see it moving? When my sister was hatching eggs last they would move, it was really cool.

Baby chick soon? 1 wheatey ameraucana? Maybe maybe...

-Cielo

 

[henmad]

CSisley- It was a really nice day here so so I took Pearl and her friends outside to get some natural light. Shes over a week old now and
my broody hens always have them out in the first week, so I thought I'd do the same, briefly. Pearl is on the far left. Great you saw the foot!

cielo- Lockdown, cool. Pearl waited to the very end of day 21, I was nearly giving up. Talk to the egg and you may hear it peep back!
look for the egg to move these last few days. Well you might not see it move if it's in the carton, but definitely talk to it and listen.

 

[cielo]

I will talk to the egg! Sounds fun. I thought I saw it move yesterday but it also could have been my head moving...

today is day 21. I'll see what happens. It could be infertile though. I don't know for sure. Pearl is a very pretty chick. What kind of chicken is she again? I really like the color.
-Cielo

 

[henmad]

Good Luck cielo! Pearl is a Lavander Araucana. So if shes a hen she be laying blue to blue green eggs, like your wheatey ameraucana egg/chick. We'll have to compare egg color in another six months unless we wind up with a couple of cockerels!

 

[henmad]

Any News?

CSisley, cielo, discoveregg, suzeqf, Balefire and Marlene are all due around now. Hows it going?

 

[discoveregg]

I have 3 cuckoo marans chicks and 3 dominique chicks

bator is still running, today is Day 21 so I'll leave the rest in for a day or 2 more...

 

[henmad]

Congrats discoveregg! They will be nice together. We have a Copper Black Marans pullet we hope will start to lay any time now.

 

[CSisley]

Hello All! Very sorry I haven't posted anything lately, somehow the year on my computer got changed to 2012 and you wouldn't believe the problems that will result over such a small change.

As some of you might recall at one point I had two eggs out of six that I wasn’t sure were developing. I was finally able to weed them out as no good so that left me with four that went into lockdown.

Monday around 3:30pm my husband saw the first pip and heard peeping and by that evening two more had pipped. Tuesday morning at about 5:15 the first chick emerged and by 11:00am the other two that had pipped hatched.

The last egg never hatched but did have a fully formed dead chick. The only thing left to develop was the absorption of the yolk sac. I thought maybe it was the result of my humidity being too high but when I opened the egg the air cell hadn’t even been broken into and the cell itself was completely dry. There seemed be a lot of mucous around the chick inside the membrane which I could actually see rolling around when I candled the egg before opening it up. This egg did have an unusually high weight loss compared to the others of 21%. Anyway I suppose that’s just how things go sometimes but I hope I can learn from it and know how to avoid it for the next hatch. I will say that I’ve learned that shipped eggs just aren’t reliable at all. I’m so glad I’m only paying for the chicks that hatched because the losses I saw would have been a whole lot more disappointing had I paid for all of them.

So for my first hatch 3 out of 8. Not a great percent but I'm still thrilled. I had a wonderful time watching these little guys grow, I can't wait to see what they'll be like as adults.

Now for the important part, pictures!!!

There he is, the first chick I’ve ever had the privilege of hatching.

Three nicely emptied egg shells and three drying chicks.

Three beautiful chicks ready for what I call the biddie box. The Swedish Flower Hen is in the middle with a BLRW on either side. The chick on the far right was the first to hatch.

The three chicks I hatched with the 15 I ordered. The 15 came in early this morning.

 

[CSisley]

Congratulations discoveregg!

Henmad, very cute picture! I'm looking forward to taking mine out for the first time, it's neat to see how they respond to the new environment.