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Thursday, April 9, 2015

New Spring Chicks

Things sure have been busy in our house lately! It all started about 7 weeks ago when our favorite rooster, Deuce, was attacked and had to be put down. We were planning on incubating some eggs this spring because we wanted to have some of his offspring, but that cold, snowy day in February was much sooner than we anticipated. But if we wanted eggs he had fertilized, we knew we had to act then, so we collected eggs for about a week. With the super cold temperatures, we didn't know how many of those eggs would develop and hatch, but we decided to give it a try anyway.

We started out with 42 eggs. After candling on day 7, we were down to 36. On day 18, we had 35.


On day 21, they started hatching. Hatching continued all the way thru day 24.


This was our first time incubating chicks, so I was just a little obsessed with watching them!



We ended up with 26 chicks. Two more of them died during the hatching process, But considering the temperatures when we collected the eggs, we had about a 75% hatch rate and I was very happy with that!




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