First Babies of Spring '11!

In all the chaos of my Lyme Disease diagnosis I completely forgot that the eggs I had in the incubator were due to hatch today.  Yesterday Ryan and I were cleaning our bedroom.  I was sitting on the bed sorting through laundry and a untangling some necklaces.  I heard peeping coming from the incubator.  It immediately dawned on me that this was the weekend I had circled on the calendar when I counted out the 21 days from when I put the eggs in the incubator.  Ryan and I quickly took all the eggs out of the automatic turner. (Which was supposed to be done at day 18 so the chicks could orient themselves upright for hatching) and filled the water wells with warm water to bring the humidity up.


When incubating eggs you should set up your incubator a few days in advance to get the temperature regulated.  You want it about 99.5 degrees but definitely no lower than 98 degrees and any higher than 103 degrees for very long will kill the developing chicks.  The humidty is also important.  During incubation it should be about 50%.  I use a digital thermometer/hydrometer that tells me the temp and humidty.  If you don't have an automatic egg turner in your incubator you need to turn your eggs 3 times a day a quarter turn.  If you don't the developing chicks will stick to the shell and won't develop properly and/or won't be able to zip out of their shell.  After day 18 you want the humidity and temperature to stay as consistent as possible so you should not open the incubator during this time unless you absolutely must.  Humidity should be about 75%-80%.  When the chicks start to hatch if the humidity is to low the membrane will dry out before the chick can get out and it can get trapped and die.  If the humidity is too high the air bubble at the end of the egg may not be big enough and the chick will drown in its shell before its able to pip.

During my hatch I'm keeping the humidity at about 85% because my humidity dipped to 20% while I was staying at my mom's and I think the membranes will not be quite wet enough.  This seemed to be the case with my first chick who pipped last night/early this morning but had not many any progress all day on its own.  I decided to flake some of its shell off carefully and let it get itself out of the membrane.  Now that the humidity has been up longer the second chick was able to pip and zip its shell all by itself without help from me.  I hear at least two other eggs chirping but they don't have external pips yet.  I candled all the eggs again today as well  and I have about 10 eggs that I'm pretty confident will hatch.  The rest were either infertile or stopped developing a while ago.  I am planning to put another batch in the 'bator in a week or so.

Chick #1 getting its sea legs



Chick #2 zipping its shell (I don't know why they call it zipping...it should be unzipping in my opinion)



And the exciting part...Hatching!
(Ryan keeps making fun of my excitement that you hear during the video.  I've hatched eggs only one other time and did not have a hydrometer and had to help all of the chicks out of their shells which is not nearly as fun as watching them do it all by themselves.  Ryan can suck an egg (pun intended, lol))