Tuesday, July 27, 2010

A new chicken ...

One baby chick hatched today! This is from a batch of only ten eggs, hopefully more will hatch today or tomorrow. Since we no longer have a rooster (it attacked my two-year-old granddaughter, so that rooster was Sunday dinner), all of the eggs may not be fertile. (We gathered eggs for five days after the rooster was dispatched.) I candled them after a week and they seemed to be developing, but I never checked them after that, so we will have to wait and see. The one hatched chick is really cute!

I do have another incubator set up with eighteen eggs that should be fertile; they came from my son, who does have a rooster, and they are only two days old. So, in three weeks I will be waiting for them to hatch!

My hatching record is not good so far; out of close to 300 pheasant eggs, I successfully hatched out only about fifty, in three separate batches. Supposedly chickens are easier to hatch (pheasants need high humidity as well as the correct temperature), so I certainly hope I hatch more than my current 10%!!

Wow, I just went outside to get the dogs in, and it is HOT. According to the thermometer, it is 92 degrees IN THE SHADE. HOT!!

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