Countdown To The 10th Anniversary Of Chickam!

Today I set eggs in our good ol' ReptiPro incubator, in three weeks there should be chicks!

This is a landmark year--2018 marks the 10th year we've been hosting Chickam, our 24/7 webcast of the hatch of baby chicks and their subsequent 8 weeks of life.  We've been hatching chicks since about 2001, but only started the webcast in 2008.

Since this is both a special year, and Easter (our traditional hatch day) falls on April 1st this time around, we decided to hatch some special breeds--time for some feathered silliness!

So I shopped around on the Internet, and in addition to hatching some of our own eggs I got some Dark India Cornish Rock Bantams, some Polish (possible Frizzles) and Brahma mixes and Bantam Cochin (more possible Frizzles) mixes.  With Frizzles you don't know at hatch if you have a Frizzle or not--you have to wait until real feathers start to come in to spot the tell-tale curl to the feathers.  And since wing feathers come in first on a baby chick, that's where any frizzling will show up first.

Here are the eggs!

First up, some of the shipped eggs.  On the right, the large white eggs at the bottom are the 3 Polish eggs--speckled, buff, silved laced and gold laced are the colors we may get. At the top right are the 5 Brahma/Heavy breed mix eggs, they are more of a who-knows-what-you'll-get variety.

On the left are the 8 bantam Cochin eggs.  The 7 eggs marked 'MF' have a MilleFleur coloration, the one marked 'CB' is a calico color.  The egg marked 'Wiggles' is one of ours that happened to be in the picture. We decided later that it was likely NOT laid by Wiggles (a Belgian d'Uccle) but is more likely to have been laid by Popcorn, who is a bantam Cochin mix hen.

Next are the 9 Dark India Cornish Bantam eggs.  The one at the top was sadly broken in shipping, so we ended up with 9 instead of 10.  I also candled the others to check for cracks and saw some detached air cells (a very bad thing) in some of the eggs, which points to rough handling in shipping. I'm hoping for the best with these...

Finally, 13 eggs from OUR girls!  We always include some of our own eggs since shipped eggs have a notoriously low hatch rate due to the inevitable rough treatment they receive from the US postal service.

The 'Wiggles' egg is in there, and not pictured is a last-minute addition of a tiny bantam egg, likely from one of the d'Uccle girls.  But I went for a cross-section of our flock in this collection--some large breeds, some bantams, and everything in between.

We have a total of 39 eggs that I started today in the incubator. In addition to each egg getting a number and a breed mark when I knew it (no breed marks for our eggs, 'I' for the Dark India Cornish, 'P' for Polish, 'B' for Brahma mix and 'CB' and 'MF' for the bantam Cochins) I marked an X on one side and a O on the other, and started them with the X side up. Over the next three weeks I will turn the eggs 5 times a day, from X side up to O side up at each turn.

The device at the top right is a hygrometer, is measures the humidity in the incubator, which needs to be 50% for the first 18 days, 65% for the final three days. The cord on the left leads to a thermometer outside the incubator--the probe for the thermometer is stuck inside a glitter pink Disney princess water weasel toy--the water weasel simulates an egg, the probe gets stuck inside the thing to get you an idea of the weather INSIDE an egg, giving you a better hatch! You want a reading of 99.5 degrees inside the eggs.  At the very bottom of the incubator is a dish with water in it to provide humidity--the marbles are just so when the chicks hatch, they don't soak themselves or drown in the water dish.  I could have added the marbles later on, but wanted to get everything up to temperature at the beginning and not have to mess with it later.  The thin black silicone mat on the floor of the incubator will give the hatched chicks needed traction for the few hours they are drying out in the incubator so that they don't develop Spraddle Leg.

Ten days from now, I'll candle each egg.  Eggs that haven't started to develop an embryo will get pulled from the incubator, those with developing embryos remain.  If an eggshell is too dark to see through when candled (like the dark green and dark brown eggs), they stay in the incubator.  Usually only about half of the shipped eggs develop at best, but we tend to get about an 80% or better development on our eggs.

Chicken eggs typically hatch after 21 days of incubation, with bantam eggs sometimes hatching 1-2 days early-so I suggest you check the UStream Chickam channel starting on March 29th.  If all goes well, Chickam will be the weekend of March 31st-April 1st!  The cam isn't started until the first egg pips, so if you tune in to the UStream channel linked above and see EGGS, it means the hatch has begun!

Fingers crossed for lots of embryos in 10 days and a bunch of little April Fools in 3 weeks!