We Are 'Go' For Our 15th Year Of Chickam !

28 C-Seeds have been placed in the ReptiPro...now to wait for three weeks!

 

All of the equipment has been calibrated and is working great!

The red things on the left are a toy called 'water weasels', each one has a thermometer probe in it--one goes to the Spot Check, the other to a new Thermoworks Chef's Alarm. Yes, the Chef's Alarm unit is technically for the BBQ...but hey, it works. It does temperature and humidity, you can set a high/low range on it and it'll alert you to any deviations. As for the use of the water weasels--it's a hack:  the water weasel simulates an egg, and inserting the temp probe gives you the most accurate idea of how the weather is inside an egg! This is vital, because there is a very narrow temperature range required by eggs in order for them to hatch. Too hot or too cold, and no chicks.

The last two years we've had such a miserable hatch, plus chick deaths, that I made some changes this year...and having four thermometers and two hygrometers is one of them!

The shot glass in the bottom holds water, you need 55% humidity in the incubator. The square white thing on the second shelf is the sensor for the Govee thermometer/hygrometer, it synchs with my phone and charts the temperature/humidity every 15 minutes, with the Govee you can set a high/low range and it'll alert you to any excursions outside that range so you can adjust your incubator.

On the top right is a new thermometer/hygrometer--between the Govee and this one, I know the humidity on each shelf.

I'll candle the eggs in 10 days to see how many embryos we have.

Meanwhile, they'll get turned 5 times a day!

What's This?

Hey look, it's 28 Chickam eggs!
They go into the ReptiPro in about 6 hours!

This will be our 15th year of doing Chickam, yay! 
Because we are gluttons for punishment and powerless to resist cute fluffies...

All but three of these eggs are from our flock--sadly, when I candled the eggs tonight, 10 of the 12 eggs we got locally were badly cracked from repeated pecking (it seems our friend has an egg eater in his flock!)

#1-3 are the eggs from our friend. I know who laid some of our eggs: #4 Brick (bantam Cochin mix), 5 Slick Charlie (Partridge Rock), 6 Spork (Barred Rock), 7 Sesame (Smokey Pearl), 9 Cheerio (Cochin/Americaunas/Red Star mix).

There are 4 bantam eggs (#15-18, which will no doubt hatch first), the rest are a mix across our flock. I believe #19-20 are from Frittata (Danish Brown Leghorn), Pearl (Sussex mix) or Boombox (White Leghorn).

All of the equipment is running perfectly and ready to go!

Gearing Up For Chickam...

So I'm doing my best to avoid a repeat of the chick deathfest that has plagued Chickam for the last two years.

Chicks need to incubate at a temperature of 99.5, with humidity for day 1-18 at 50%, 65% days 19-21. Nobody does it better than a hen.

Keeping the temp/humidity consistent inside an incubator is generally agreed to be a MASSIVE PAIN. Since 2/6 I've been test running the ReptiPro and all of our assorted devices (including some nifty new ones!) that track temperature/humidity...I wanted to work out all possible bugs. Everything got calibrated (ice bath AND salt method), several times just to be sure.

Thanks to a generous Chickam patron, we were able to get some new equipment. The first is a Chef's Alarm temperature monitor (yes, it's for use in barbecuing. Hey, any port in a storm). You can set the alarm to alert you if the temps go above/below the range you specify, and it uses a probe (I had to order a shorter one than the one pictured) that is going inside a water weasel on one of the incubator racks. Our old Spot Check temp probe will go in a water weasel on the other rack.

Next is a Govee Smart thermometer/Hygrometer. VERY accurate, the little unit goes inside the incubator and synchs to your smartphone--and tracks temp/humidity spikes and drops by hour, day, week and month.

 

Lastly, I got a new digital hygrometer, so I could have it on one shelf and the Govee on the other.

I even dismantled the ReptiPro in order to clean out dust/chick dander from its innards. Which was a good thing, as I didn't realize just how nasty it had gotten in there over the years! I took the back off to find this:

And...

When you can write 'Ick!' in the dust, you know it needs cleaning.

In the end, everything was thoroughly cleaned.

I've poured over my hatch records going back to the beginning of time. Read articles online hour after hour until my eyeballs are about to fall out & my brain is overstuffed on high altitude hatching. I came up with little that was new to me, which is good--but I think I figured out the cause of the chicks dying and have done everything I can to prevent it.

One thing about the chicks that died last year, was that they ALL died 4 days post-hatch, within a few hours of each other, and all displayed identical symptoms.

It's a red flag--a chick survives it's first 1-3 days living off the last of the egg yolk it absorbs just before hatching. It's why hatchery chicks survive 1-3 days of shipping w/no food or water. I suspect our incubation temps/humidity were off without us knowing it, which caused internal defects to form. I think this made it impossible for the chicks to process any food they ate post-hatch--and they weakened & died.

It would fit. The chicks did tend to walk like their gut bothered them...

When I calibrated everything this year, it turns out that the old hygrometer was reading 11% too humid & the Spot Check temperature 1 degree too cold! It's amazing we got anything to hatch last year.

Hopefully that's now under control. Hatching at high altitudes is already hard enough, there is an unavoidable ding to your hatch rate of 50% or so. No magic bullet for a great hatch at our altitude, but every little 'help' counts at 4800 feet!

Meanwhile, here are the eggs we'll choose from!

Ours (some we know are from certain hens):

And eggs from our local friend:

Getting these eggs was a whole 'nother mini-adventure that involved trying to drive out to his house the day after our area had a voluntary evacuation from flooding by the lastest in a series of Atmospheric River megastorms. Our friend is WAY out across the valley with no other houses within miles...

...so of course we got stuck in the mud.

We eventually got loose, but had to give up and go home. Our poor car--!

Kind friend met us in town the next day with the eggs.

So, we're as ready as we're gonna be! The eggs go into the incubator this Saturday, March 18th for a target hatch date of Easter weekend, April 8-9th. BUT--as usual, start checking our YouTube channel a day or so BEFORE that, as high altitude chicks tend to hatch early!

I'll post updates on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/chickam2008

When Chickam starts, you can watch it here--if you tune in and see EGGS instead of Jack, the hatch has begun! Click on the 'Notify Me' icon to get an alert from YouTube when we go live:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CteVAyCD2iY

Does Something Smell Like Burnt Toast...?

Up here, 'Snow Removal' means the snow comes along and removes what you have by crushing it.

Almost two months after our series of Pineapple Express blizzards, the snow has finally melted off enough to see the totality of its work--this is the first day I could walk around the small run to see the back.

I must say, it was effective. And notice our next storm working up in the background, there.

The small chicken run it crushed, fortunately uninhabited at the time:

Really did a number on the door and popped it from its frame.

The side...

Yikes, this isn't getting any better as I round the corner...

Urgh...the back of the run.

The way the weight of the snow just...bent and snapped steel pipe is impressive. Tore the hardware cloth like it was nothing, too.

Le sigh...Welp, now to rebuild it from the ground up. We can reuse the door and some of the hardware cloth, possibly some of the steel pipe, fasteners, etc...

Our landscaping took a hit as well, luckily just broken branches. The house rode the storms like a champ, although it does now have some little gaps here and there where wall meets ceiling that weren't there before...

I'll take it.

Snowpocalypse!

And it really, really means it this time.

It's been snowing since New Year's Eve, we got three feet of snow overnight on December 31st alone. And then it just kept snowing. 

We woke up New Year's Day to that dead silence you get when the power is out. Uh oh...

Here's a small sample of my last 4 days, when overnight on NYE we lost our power/Internet/Heat/Phone and were catapulted back to the 1870's. My little green 1970's Panasonic Panapet transistor radio was hauled out of storage, fed a fresh 9V battery and put to work.

 Ahhh...the good ol' days, when you froze your ass off.

But back to Snowpocalypse.

See how deep the tire tracks are, on the extreme left in the first pic below?

To the question, 'Can my husband, driving the family car, make it home for two days when it's this deep?'

The answer is:  'LOL, No.'

We had no way to communicate with each other, we all just had to hope everyone was okay. Since we knew this storm was coming, we'd already agreed ahead of time that if he couldn't get home he'd either hole up at work, or the local casino/lodge if they had rooms available (on NYE. LOL).

So...he had to spend NYE and the next day at the casino/lodge (they had generators, so had power) along with 90 billion drunks and other stuck locals, camped out in a chair in a corner (no rooms to be had, naturally). People slept on the floors all over, and the staff kept the booze flowing to keep everyone happy.

It wasn't until two of our neighbors got out their backhoes and plowed the entire neighborhood for blocks and blocks around us that he made it home...

...two days later. And even then; it took hours, cost us a busted tailight cover, and he just barely got here.

Our town was so snowed under they couldn't even keep the main highway driveable, so I can't fault them, they had their hands full. Our area never sees snow this deep; for so long, with so many heavy storms in quick succession, and with snow that doesn't melt. Everything was frozen to a standstill.

We've been without power/heat/Internet/phone for the last 4 days, finally got it back today. Downed trees/power lines are everywhere, and it's SO COLD. My little woodburning fireplace, a PILE of candles and our body heat is all that kept our pipes from freezing--so even if we could have gotten out, we weren't going to abandon the house.

To the end of our driveway was as far as I could get, the snow was hip-deep on me. Our cars are under there, somewhere...I don't even want to think about the condition of the convertible top on the Plymouth. Suffice to say it's gone.

The chickens had their own personal Ice Fortress. You can see the top of the small run on the right, touching the ground.

The kid had to shovel a path to even get to them first. 

 

The small run, on the right, is now officially, fully toast.

 

I mean...

 

Full-on, irretrievably blackened, fills-your-house-with-that-burnt-toast-stink, toast.

My neighbor up on his roof doing snow removal.

 

But before the snow really arrived, the wind destroyed my front screen door--so Howling Nevada Windstorm got its licks in, too. Can't let Snowpocalypse have all the fun!

 

 

With the power out, we transfer anything perishable to coolers packed with snow. I mean, there's literally tons of the stuff just lying around, it can pull its damned weight.

  

2023 so far can BITE ME.

 

 

A Little Time Lapse Of How Things Went...

So New Year's Eve started off okay. Husband at work, the kid and I at home. We'd prepared for the Pineapple Express by stocking up, securing everything, bringing in firewood...

It had been raining heavily for days, everything was a foot deep in water when it began to snow on NYE around 11AM. Anyone who recalls the Walker River CA flood of 1997 knows the conditions were identical...this is NOT a good thing.

11AM. BIG fat clumps of snow! Small run on right has a bit of a bent top from our last snowstorm, but is intact.

Same view, 3PM...Top of small run bending under heavy snow.

Front yard, 11AM...

Same view,  3PM...

Same view, 6PM... The chairs are disappearing and the fireplug outside the fence is gone, LOL.

Midnight! A foot and a half deep and still snowing heavily.

Requisite snow angel is made, second thoughts halfway through are evident.

At this point, the kid and I had our champagne, which had been properly chilled...

 ...and went to bed.

Things got way worse by dawn.

One Of The First Signs Of Winter...

 ...are the upside-down traffic cameras around here.

Our big storms are always preceded by a Howling Nevada Windstorm, whose job it is to not only relocate your trash can five blocks over, but also beat the traffic cams into submission and flip them over. Last week, out in Washoe Valley not one of the five traffic cams was pointed at the road. Instead they showed cows...the sides of hills...some guy's truck in his yard...

They still work, of course. So we get fun views like this, with upside-down trees:

Last year was better though:

To be fair, this was just ahead of the storm that left us with this:

Can't wait to see what we get before the year ends!