LOCKDOWN DAY!
The 10 Chickam eggs got their final turn last night at 11PM, and today got moved to the bottom of the incubator in preparation for hatching. Larger eggs to the back, smaller eggs out in front.
This is the first hatch for our new Vevor incubator...although not really a fair test for it, for reasons I'll get into further down (because it's not Chickam without some kind of damn drama). But this is when we raise the humidity to 65% (from 50%), and open the incubator five times a day for about a minute, to get fresh air in there. No longer turning the eggs signals the chicks to rotate into hatching position, then they pip the aircell inside, THEN they'll pip.
One of the eggs, #4 (on left, in front), peeped at me when I moved it. That's Bobo's egg, she's a tiny black bantam Cochin. Our bantam eggs have always hatched early, sometimes as early as the first day of lockdown! I checked carefully both visually and by feel, and nobody's pipped yet.
We had a 4 hour power outage last night, a repeat of ANOTHER 4-5 hour outage at around day 7. Just like for the first one, I placed a hot water bottle in the incubator and was able to keep the temperature at an acceptable 99.7 to 100.5 degrees...but it shot the humidity ALL to shit, spiking it at 80-90% (eggs at that stage want 50%!). I had to keep opening the incubator every 15 minutes to vent it off.
Of the two big girls who had gone broody, Gretchen refused to sit on test eggs, but Sticky did--so we held her in reserve in case the power didn't come back on before our bedtime. Sticky being a 1 year old, zero-experience mom, I didn't want to put all our eggs in one basket (sorry) by giving them to her unless we had no other choice.
I'm not sure what effect those two events had on the hatching eggs, if any. If the humidity is too high for too long, water fills the air cell...and when the chicks pip into it for air to breathe, they drown. There's no way for me to tell if water has filled the air cells, and nothing we can do about it, anyway. So we just cross our fingers and hope.
I'm not going to move the camera off the chicks until one of the eggs starts actually unzipping--eggs can pip up to 24 hours before they start to unzip. Watch or follow the Chickam account on BlueSky for updates:
Watch the chicks now at the link below, eggs are due to hatch this Saturday & Sunday, May 31st and June 1st!
There's a kid-friendly chat feature there (anyone NOT keeping things kid-friendly will get banned, no second chances), and as always you can submit a name for the chicks--one per person please--we'll pick names out of a hat as chicks hatch.
