This is in reference to the incubator. The last three days of the 21 days it takes to hatch a chicken egg is lock down time. The eggs will no longer be turned and it is best to not open the incubator. NOTE: I do open the incubator to put more eggs in (using a two incubator system) and also if the humidity makes it necessary for me to add water. I just do it quickly.
Author Archives: frankie
Hatching chicks is addictive
OMG, I love waking up in the morning to hear little peeping coming from my incubator.
Yesterday morning, I heard peeping and found a black little Silkie chick standing in the incubator. It is amazing to me that a chick can peck its way out of the shell and be walking around the next morning. I always check the eggs just before I go to bed and there wasn’t even a chip or crack in any of the eggs.
Then this morning, I heard peeping again. Much to my delight, two baby chicks. The dark one was up and trying to walk and was actually pretty dry looking. The little grey one was still trying to get up on its feet and still a little damp looking. They fluff out so quickly. The dark one I put into the bath tub with the other four chicks that have hatched out in the last week or so. The little grey one I will keep under a heat lamp by itself for a few more hours. She just looks like she wants to sleep.
I call all my chicks “she” from the time they are hatched. I like to think I am speaking it into existence. Hens are easier to sell and of course, there is the whole egg thing. Not much production from the rooster. As my husband so eloquently put it,” the hens lay the eggs and the roosters lay the hens. ” So unless you want fertilized eggs, there isn’t much use for the rooster. And yes, the chickens do lay eggs without a rooster.
I do feel the rooster protects the hens. My neighbor said there was a stray cat in my yard the other day looking like he wanted chicken for dinner. He said the rooster charged the cat a number of times and the cat left the premises. I wish I could have seen that.
The rooster is also frequently more colorful than the hen and of course, who doesn’t love the sound of a rooster at 5am. lol
If you look at the website backyardchickens.com you will see I am not the only person addicted to chickens or hatching out chicks. That website has been a wealth of knowledge for me.
Well, I have three more eggs in my incubator that should hatch in the next day or so and my second incubator is loaded down with eggs but they won’t start hatching until the end of the month. Oh yeah, don’t wash your eggs if you want to hatch them. There is this protective “boom” on the egg that you don’t want to wash away.
Leah, a fellow chicken raiser, showed me a great system for hatching eggs. She uses two incubators. One incubator has the egg turner in it and the other does not.
I write the date I put the egg into the incubator and I know 21 days later I will have a chick if all goes well. I remove the eggs as each egg reaches the 18th day and put it into the second incubator to hatch. You just lie the egg down and leave it to hatch now.
Don’t forget to set the incubator up 24 to 48 hours ahead of your date you intend to put eggs in it. You need to get your temperature and humidity correct before adding eggs. So, I don’t get the second incubator ready until day 16. That gives me two days to make sure the incubator is working correctly. And please go buy a hydrogrometer (I think that is what it is called) to check your humidity and temp. You can see it in the next picture. I got mine at Walmart for about 6 bucks, I think.
So let’s say its day 18, and four of the eggs need to go into the second incubator. You put them in the second incubator and they will hatch there in three days. The next day, you have three eggs that need to go into the second incubator. QUICKLY, open the incubator and put the eggs in. I say quickly because once the eggs reach the 18th day, they should go into “lock down.” That means you don’t turn the eggs and you normally would not open the lid.
Because I do not get forty eggs in one day, I use this system and it works fine for me. Just don’t have the second incubator open any longer than you must. You might have to add more water and you need to add more eggs as the 18th day arrives.
Once the egg hatches and the chick emerges, leave her in there. Let her dry some and get her walking legs though wobbly they will be. I have read you leave them in the incubator after hatched for 24 hours. Doesn’t happen for me. I am so excited. Again, I quickly grab the baby chick and the shell and remove them to be put under a heat lamp with the temperature already at 100 degrees. I have a themometer lying in the bed where the new chick is will be so I am sure the temp is not too hot or too cold.
This box is about a 10×10 inch with a folded t-shirt in it. She will stay in it until I see she is walking around and pretty much fluffed out…usually a matter of hours. The heat lamp is red. This is the little grey chick hatched this morning.
I use stained t-shirts or old towels for the bedding. Of course, I have washed them and they are clean. I think the babies can get better footing on the t-shirts and get up and going faster. I have seen other people use plastic containers with wood shavings. Slippery to me and I think I read you shouldn’t use wood shavings. Chicks eat anything.
These are chicks in the bath tub under the red heat lamp. Chicks needs to have 100 degree temperature for the first two weeks. The little chick at the bottom of the picture is the dark chick that hatched out this morning.
Your chicks will not need food or water for three days but I always have it in the chick’s yard/tub/box waiting for them to get the urge. The yellow yoke was the baby’s food and water and it was absorbed into the chick thru the rectum area. That is what keeps them satisfied for a couple days. That is why chicken wholesalers can send baby chicks thru the mail when they are one day old.
I hope the things I tell you are informative. I really enjoy my chickens as you can probably tell. It really gives me something to look forward to each morning after I get my hubby off to work. As soon as it is daylight, I am outside feeding my chickens and seeing that all of them made it thru the night. I have a couple of broody hens right now and I soon will be checking them daily to see if any new baby chicks have hatched.
My chicken yard looks rather red-neck right now but I have lots of plans to make my chicken yard/houses look like a nice neighborhood. I am going to put a privacy fence around their yard, too. It is fun for me to make drawings and make plans for the future for their surroundings.
Maybe it is the motherly side of me or the creative side of me or the control freak part of me that makes me enjoy this life so much. I am looking forward to the fall when we will prepare our soil for our first garden, if all goes well. Vegetable seeds are so cheap and any extra food we grow and don’t eat will go to our relatives first and then the chickens.
This is indeed, a quiet and peaceable life. I love it.
Re-using things for my chicken yard
I am continually using things for my chickens and their yard instead of throwing them away. Sometimes I go to Habitat and get wood and boards.
Recently, we had a 4×4 porch top that was getting old and we were going to burn it. Instead, we put it up on cinder blocks and it made some shade and a place for the chickens to hide in case they felt threatened by a large overhead bird. Picture below.
We also had a piece of particle board that was laying around somewhere and we took it and made a shelter for our animal’s food. It works great. Particle board is the cheapest board around that I have seen. The below example has been used for about 7 years and moved all around from yard to yard. You can also see the yellow crate that I use for the chicken to stand on to get onto the perch or into the nest for laying eggs. The crates are also great for nests.
I also use one gallon containers that I get from Bojangles to use for water containers in the yard. I ask the manager to save the coleslaw containers for me. If I am cleaning out one of the containers and forget a scrubby, I grab a leaf off the tree and use it to scrub. It works great. The chlorophyll is like Clorox. I was just looking for something abrasive and did not expect the leaf would actually get rid of the algae inside the container. I try to put my water containers in the shade so they do not get the sun and get the algae but sometimes they get shade part of the day and sun the other part.
I also used an old dog house for a broody house for a hen. I had to put a fence up in front of the entrance for a couple hours until the hen settled back down and got back on the eggs. They don’t like it when you move them even with their eggs.
One of the first broody houses I made was from a kitchen table that was rectangular. I screwed wood panels around three sides with some chicken fencing up around the top four inches. I planned to paint it but that didn’t happen.
When I realized how hot it was and how little shade I had for my Silkies, I took a flat bed sheet and put a couple bricks on the top of the building to secure it. Then I stretched it out on the ground and put bricks on it to hold it securely. The chickens stay under it during the hot part of the day and I put their water under there, too. You can see the blue colored sheet in front of the chicken house.
Everything I see at Habitat, Flea Markets, Yard Sales or anywhere else is a possible find for my chicken yard. I also used an old coffee table to put my chicken food dish under. Now it isn’t fancy and it does look kind of junky…sometimes. But I have a bigger plan down the road when my husband, Calvin retires. His boss asked him what he was going to do when he retires. He told him his wife would keep him busy…and hopefully healthy and young, too.
The table was free, coffee table was free, porch was free, and the sheets were free. So, I just made use of the things that weren’t being used. Adding some paint to some stuff will improve the look of your yard but I suggest you use colors that blend with your surroundings. I am thinking about putting a privacy fence around my entire chicken yard. It is definitely a work in progress.
Pictures of my family of chickens
Today I had someone request that I put more pictures on my blog. So I thought I would introduce you to some of my chickens.
So I will start at the beginning. These are some of my eggs that my chickens lay. The tiny egg up top on the right is one of the first eggs Pex laid. Pex was named by my grand daughter.
This is a two week old Americuana baby chick.
This is a Silkie baby chick that is less than a week old. I took this picture with the coffee cup so you can get a better idea how small it is.
This is my favorite baby in the whole world. My second grand daughter who was born Jan 8, 2011. Ain’t she cute?
This is Mr. Henny Penny. He is a Patridge Silkie and the first Silkie we purchased. Mrs. Henny Penny was killed by a chicken hawk while protecting her baby chicks. Mr. Henny Penny has two buff colored hens in his pen in order to guarantee buff colored chicks. At least we hope we get buff. Not sure there are guarantees when it comes to chickens.
These are my four adult white Silkies. The back one and the middle front one are bearded Silkies. The one on the left one is the rooster and the one on the right is a hen, both non-bearded. I also have four white babies about two months old plus three whites that are about one month old.
This is my Silkie chicken yard. The grey and white colored ones are called Splash Silkies. The one in the middle of the pictures is a Patridge Silkie (that has a gold colored neck). We call her Trouble because she was always getting out of her yard.
This is an Americuana/Silkie mix hen. She has the speckled coloring of the Americuana but she is small and with feathered legs like the Silkies. I have about 9 of these mixed chickens and I think they are really pretty.
These are a couple of my Patridge Silkie roosters. Both of them were hatched out on our property. I have too many roosters actually but I just can’t seem to allow them to be sold. Silkie roosters don’t fight with each other like other kinds of chickens. If they are raised together, they seem to get along fine. I have about six of them and they are in a separate yard.
I have another chicken yard where my brown egg laying chickens are kept. This is my rooster, Barred Rock mostly. You can see the black and white hen on the right behind him and then a hen with a black with a gold colored neck. Still can’t figure out how she ended up that color. There are about 14 chickens in that yard. I recently hatched out some of my brown eggs because I realized my hens were getting old and dying off.
This one of my Americuana chickens. They lay either green, blue or pink eggs. Mine lay green mostly but some lay a pale blue. One lays an olive green egg. I was surprised when one of the chicks hatched out of a green was a white Americuana. Strange.
This is a good picture because you can see the different colors of the Silkie chickens. The chicken in the middle of the yard is a greyish white Silkie but they are considered Light Blue. Then you can see some Black Silkies, too. The ones that are dark grey are considered Dark Blue. You can also see the yard is divided so the younger ones are together. They will go out into the larger yard once they are about 5 months old.
These are are two chicken sitters…lol. Their yard is very close to our chicken yard so if we hear a lot of barking at night, I get up to check on my chickens. I hate when there is a full moon because they bark a lot. Cassie is the black and white dog, part Border Collie and Australian Shepherd. My daughter, Bonnie helped me pick her out and she has been a joy. I got her for my birthday when I turned 50, and she is almost 12 now. Olivia is the Hound dog that Bonnie gave me for Christmas one year and is about 7 years old. Her sister, Chloe passed away just a few months ago and I miss her so much. She was a bouncy, happy dog.
I hope you enjoy my pictures, Michael, Dan, and Vince.
Helping chick out of shell
The date had past for the eggs to hatch in the incubator and I waited a couple more days just to be sure. Then one of the four eggs hatched so I waited a couple more days. I wanted to put more eggs in the incubator and start a new batch so I took the the remaining three eggs out.
Two of the eggs felt heavy like there were chicks inside so I carefully hit the fat end of the egg enough to make a small crack and then peeled it open until I could see the beak. The large end of the egg is where the head will be and it will start pecking or zipping it’s way out. I made a big enough hole so the chick could get air and put it back into the incubator. I could see it was alive because there was throbbing of the skin and the beak was moving.
The second egg pretty much went the same way…live chick, not ready to be hatched so I put it back in the incubator after assuring myself that the chick could get air. The membrane inside the shell is sometimes soft if there is a lot of moisture and then looks like paper if it is dryer in the incubator. Then there seems to be another clear membrane that can shrink wrap the chick if there is not enough moisture.
I was really glad I opened the second egg because I think the chick was in there so tightly that it might not have been able to move around to zip out of the egg. I have opened a couple eggs after the due date had past and there was a perfectly healthy chick in there dead. I can only assume the chick could not get out and the air pocket was gone. Who knows?
I have opened many eggs and the chicks have survived. I left the two chicks for a day and the chicks had not tried to get out of the shell. I opened the shell carefully so I could see the chicks bottom but yet not pull it out of the shell and disconnect it. I could see there was some yellow yoke that had not been absorbed into the chick yet so I knew I needed to leave the chick alone for another day. Which is what I did.
So the next day, I carefully checked the yoke sac and it was gone so I removed the chick and carefully cut the chick loose. I put a little flour on its bottom to assure it’s bottom didn’t stick to the material that I was going to lie it on. I put the chick under a heat lamp on a tshirt inside a small box and let it dry out. It wiggled alot and started drying itself off and was looking fluffy. After about twelve hours, I realized the heat lamp made the chick more like 105 instead of 99/100 and it looked distressed. I took some sugar water and a straw and slowly gave it a sip of water. It’s head was rather limp and it was acting really weak. So sad. But, much to my delight, an hour later the chick was trying to stand up and seemed much stronger.
I have since put the chick outside with another momma hen who just hatched a baby chick two days ago. I try to get the chick with a momma right away. When I have kept a chick by herself, it died.
The second chick is still in the incubator. I will wait and see when the yoke is absorbed before I take any further steps.
So, don’t be afraid to help the chick out of the shell. Be sure to keep the chick really warm…about 99/100 degrees. If there is any bleeding or gooey stuff on its bottom, be sure and use flour to stop the moist end from sticking to any material. If it starts to pull away and wiggle around and it sticks, it could make it bleed more and there isn’t that much blood in a small chick.
Good luck with your baby chicks. They are a joy.