The Few, But Mighty!

Welp, this being a very strange year, it might as well affect Chickam, as well.

Out of the 36 eggs I set in our ReptiPro incubator ten days ago...only 10 have developed and show embryos. Weirdly, six of those eggs are ones we got from our neighbors, that had been refrigerated...I wasn't holding out much hope for those! An additional 6 eggs were too dark to tell if embryos were there, so I left them in the incubator...but time will tell, for those six.

For the rest, a whopping 13 were fertile yet never developed, with 5 more having damaged yolks. Only two eggs were infertile.

What does all this mean? Well, basically our hens and roos are doing their chicken thing and giving us strong-shelled, fertile eggs. WHY they never developed, not even for one day...is a mystery. The flock is healthy, and the ReptiPro incubator is working perfectly.

But...we'll take what we can get! On the plus side, with a small hatch comes the possibility that one of our broody hens can foster mama the chicks, provided we have a broody or two to choose from in two weeks. Right now we have several hens that are broody, so we'll see!

Onward to our hatch day of Saturday, April 11th!*


*Knowing our eggs, the actual hatch will start 1-2 days early tho, start checking our YouTube page on the 9th!

Chickam 2020 Is On!

Crappy scary human viruses shouldn't be allowed to spoil all your fun, or totally disrupt your traditions!

Today we set 36 eggs in our ReptiPro incubator. Incubation should take 21 days, and our planned hatch date is April 11th, the day before Easter...although like always, I'm sure the bantam eggs will hatch in 20 days instead of 21, like normal chickens. So I'd say start checking in on day 19 of incubation--April 9th--for updates.

Eight of the eggs were a gift from our kind neighbors down the street who have some white Leghorns and lovely, fluffy buff Brahmas...but I'm afraid they refrigerated the eggs, which likely killed the embryos.  It broke my heart, when they gave us the egg carton and it was cold. But what the heck, we'll try them anyway--so eggs numbered 1 through 8 are the neighbor's eggs. The other thing is that most of the eggs they gave us are large, white eggs--and buff Brahmas lay light brown/tan eggs.
We'll just see what we get, it'll be an adventure!

The rest of the eggs are from our flock, and in all sizes, shapes and colors--a mix of standard size and bantam. For daddys, we have Milton, our bantam Cochin/Belgian d'Uccle mix roo, Bacon, our tiny bantam roo whom I believe is a Quail D'Anvers (we got him at Tractor Supply last year so he's a bit of a mystery) and Rafiki (Rafe), our Russian Orloff roo that we got at a local poultry swap last year. None of our rooboys are big, even Rafe is on the small side.

 So pictured below are our 36 starters--I'll candle the eggs at 10 days in (March 31st) and remove any duds.

Other local folks around here that I contacted had no eggs to spare, as people are panic-buying eggs. Even when I offered to trade my eggs for theirs, they had none.
Another issue may be difficulty in getting used major appliance boxes for me to knock together a brooder box with, as I usually do. Since non-essential businesses here in Nevada have been ordered to close, the local appliance store we usually get boxes from may be closed for the duration. We may have to get creative...

Damned virus anyway, interfering with my chicken plans--!

As incubation progresses, I'll update our Chickam Twitter account: Chickam Twitter
and our Chickam YouTube channel--inactive until the hatch actually starts. If you tune in to our YouTube channel and see eggs, the hatch has begun!: Chickam YouTube Webcast

Right now we only have a couple of broody hens, all are bantams that we hatched last year so their mama quality is unknown. Hopefully some of the bigger girls will step up sometime in the next three weeks and we'll have a mama for the chicks--but usually we have too many chicks for a banty hen to successfully mother.

But dang it--whatever happens, there will be baby chicks here in three weeks! Hang in there, Chickam fans, baby chick fun is on it's way...

Life Goes On...

 The Covid lockdown officially started yesterday here in the US.

So we've stocked up on people and animal supplies, now just to go into near-100% hermit mode. I've traded in my perfume for the oh-so-alluring scent of Lysol and Comet. Sanitized is the new sexy!

This coming Saturday I'll set eggs in the ReptiPro incubator for a planned hatch date of April 11th--because if ever the world needed Chickam, it's this year, dammit. We'll be hatching all eggs from our own flock, although I'm hoping to get a few buff Brahma eggs from a neighbor...fingers crossed!

Although given what our girls are offering us these days...

Strange days, indeed.
Rafe, my youngster Russian Orloff rooster, found the tiny egg out in the chicken yard, he called the kid over and drew her attention to it by clucking at it in a most concerned way. I'm just glad Rafe is finally getting his rooster thing goin', he was a slow starter.

We were going to run the camera on the adult flock last weekend--I had a cabbage on a string all ready to go--but the weather ruined things. We'll try again this coming weekend, because...yeah, the world needs some chicken-y distraction these days.

Meanwhile, we had about two weeks of lovely warmish spring weather, which fooled my plum tree into blooming--something it hasn't done during the last three years. Then this weekend we had a sudden, three-day snow/wind storm.

Yup. Snow on the blossoms. The ones the wind didn't just rip off the tree, that is.

Yeah...I didn't actually tear my hair out,but there was much grumbling as I stared out the window at the storm lashing my tree around.

We'll see if it fruits this year. This particular variety is a self-pollinator, and I had gone out with my dry paintbrush to play pollinator the day before the storm hit; since I have yet to see a bee or wasp so far.

The water drops do look pretty, though, I'll give it that.

Lastly, the Northern Lights afghan I was making is basically done!

Okay, so I got a little carried away on expanding the size of it, it's roughly 71 x 52. I also used a basic ripple pattern rather than the one that came with the kit, and plan on edging the long side edges with a single row of a simple shell pattern, just to give the edges a finished look.

Since I made it bigger, I ran short of yarn and had to order more, but I wanted an afghan that was both wide enough and long enough, dang it! Nothing's worse than trying to grab a couch nap and having to fuss with positioning an afghan so your toes don't stick out.

Anyway, that sucker's warm.