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What's wrong with their feathers?

Watching on enviously as you hatch eggs. I was hoping to have some of Renee's eggs incubating over here by now, but it's looking like importing chickens might be a better way. Still hoping we can get something sorted before the end of the season; it's driving me mad only being able to look at all your photos!
 
Really? Would think there would be more red tape with live birds compared to eggs. Not to mention how much harder long transport would be on young birds.
Both eggs and babies are fragile but eggs can be bubble wrapped (Renee's foam forms are the bee's knees!) and double (or even triple!) boxed.

Strangely fitting to have the product of imported Dutch chocolate genes returned across the pond.

I know the "new" blood entering the Chocolate AM project (silkied and hard feather) are very excited to be joining in. Misschickenlittle and I have just set eggs and are all ready holding our breaths!
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I have rung countless customs agents and the only one that actually got back to me said that it would be easier to import live birds than eggs. I thought eggs would be cheaper and easier too, but what do I know? I also thought it would be a doddle to import as the only thing that is needed is a health certificate and an agent on this end to sign the shipment off with customs. It turns out no-one does the signing. One person said they couldn't because I'm not selling the eggs?!
 
No good news on the rest of the hatch I'm afraid. It's just the two that made it.

I didn't eggtopsy all the eggs, stopped after I got through the ones I know had rocked in days 18-20 but didn't hatch. For most there was no cause of death I could discern other than likely being from heat. There was one that looked like it was a case of too-small air-cell -- for some reason that air cell was significantly smaller than the others through out the hatch. I was too discouraged to check the eggs beyond those, though I should have for a more complete picture.

My temperature/humidity logging device finally came in, so that will help get a more complete picture going forward. I can get it to pull data down every 3 minutes for the course of an entire hatch (30 days max at that sample rate). Right now I have it in there pulling some testing data on the out groups' hatch.

When I use it for a full hatch I'm going to set it to pull every minute and just keep it plugged in so I can live-dump the data to my database to monitor remotely. Eventually this data should be good for spotting some trends for hatch rate improvement/incubator setting tweaking. There's a lot of things to look at with this information, but that will be a bit further down the line.

Anyway, just wanted to post an update.
 
MOICEY!!! All read up. All 241 pages worth.

No report on the Choc Silkieds from Chooks Chicks. Have them under a broody
Scovy and she is NOT in the mood nor budging so just letting her do her thing. Figgure the less I mess the better the hatch will be
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. The 30th is 21 days........

MsChickenLittle is batoring and think she set the same day.......
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