Still have the occasional cough and squirtbut it's leaving!
I'll pray that you get it and are over it in lightning speed, my friend.I'm so happy to see you! I just put my eggs in the "incubator"...will upload pics of it in a moment. Pray for me that this works? I don't want to kill chicks needlessly in my experimenting.
I'm watching carefully - then maybe I can do the same!!!Well....I've got it all set up and now it's step out on faith time, so I prayed over the nest and will see what God can do.I'll start a thread on it over in the appropriate section but will keep updates here as well...I have a feeling I'm going to get a lot of rough treatment over this over there, so I'll need to come back here and lick my wounds until I can see if this works out 21 days from now.
Step 1: Lined a cardboard box with a trash bag and placed moist bedding/soil/leaf litter from my coop in a layer over that. Placed a couple of handfuls of snow on top of that.
Step 2: Make a "nest" on top of that with some fresh hay.
Step 3: Eggs collected over the past week from three different breeds of chickens, will choose the most uniform, large, clean eggs from the group~chose 18 eggs for this hatch.
Heat source for "broody": 12x15 in. heating pad with 6 digital settings.
Thermometer: Meat thermometer that has been tested against my old mercury style thermometer for the last 2 days and is always right on the mark, exactly.
Step 4: Arranged eggs in nest with pointy ends toward the middle, WRs/Dels/BAs from left to right. Covered lightly with disinfected rooster feathers for added insulation and humidity control.
Step 5: Inserted meat thermometer into side of box, placing tip in middle of the nest, between two eggs.
Step 6: Covered eggs with fake broody heat, warm side down.
Step 7: Placed box on windowsill in the coolest room in the house...gets slightly warmer when evening sun hits it but have placed a feather padded pillow between box and window to insulate against direct warmth on the box. I want some temp fluctuation because that's how it is out on a real broody nest, so I'm not much into controlling all ambient temps. Have old thermometer standing by to monitor temps in the window sill so I can compare them to the temps in the nest.
Step 8: Covered heat source with a feather quilted(below) and fleece covered pad~The Little Red Hen~who will later also brood the chicks while stretched over a fence wire frame and holding the heating pad in her "belly". The chicks will get under her much like they do the heat plates for chicks...but for a much cheaper price and a more controllable temperature gauge.
So...that's my experiment. I was going to conduct this on the floor of my coop but for this first time I'd like to monitor it more closely to see how widely the temperatures fluctuate in this setting. That's why I chose the coldest room, so that it would still be much like outdoors. I'll run the vaporizer in that room each time it rains or snows outside to simulate the increased moisture in the air and will also add a little moisture to the "ground" under the nest at these times. This morning at daybreak this room was 40 degrees in that windowsill. It was around 5 degrees outside at that time.
Me too!!! Guardian dogs would be great!
I would bet she didn't! Logic - are chickens sterilized?
